


Matadora

by Sylviavolk2000



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: F/M, I'm afraid that Methos isn't even in this story., some suggestive scenes. Also, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 05:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8785513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylviavolk2000/pseuds/Sylviavolk2000





	

Imagine the usual disclaimers. We, who have no lives, have no thought of monetary profit; all we possess are computers and good will.  


Warning: some violence, some suggestive scenes. Also, I'm afraid that Methos isn't even in this story. There! Now you've been warned.   
  
  


**Part One**

**_Every one is the way God made him, and even more so at times._ **

**Cervantes**  


**Spain, nineteenth century:**

**It was midnight, with the moon swathed in heavy clouds, by the time the gang of boys worked up their courage and plunged into the Rio Guadalquivir. They swam across the broad river with their clothes in bundles upon their heads, dog-paddling stealthily, barely raising a ripple . . . for the far side was forbidden land. With scarcely a sound they waded up the further bank. There, they pulled on their ragged shirts, the patched pants and rope-soled sandals which were all they owned; not one had as much as a pair of boots to call his own. For they were the poorest of the poor of Andalucia.**

**They skulked through the pastures beyond the river. This land belonged to the rancho of Dona Isabella; no woman in the town of Sobaquillo--no woman in Andalucia!--was wealthier or prouder. She guarded her vast estates as lovingly a fisherman's wife standing watch over her single stick of furniture. Trespassers were soundly whipped by her workers, and he who dared snatch an orange from her groves--even a single grape off her vines!--suffered sorely.**

**In the fields where the boys now ran from cover to cover, Dona Isabella kept her greatest treasure. What punishment awaited those who invaded her dehesa?**

**The boys knew what would happen if they were caught.**

**Once, they dropped and lay flattened on the ground, hands tucked under them so no glimpse of white skin could show, while a horseman cantered slowly past. The moon slid out of a cloud, and lit both horse and rider brightly. The horse was a powerful dapple grey, with the strong neck and handsome head of its Barb ancestry, and the light slid lingering across its hindquarters and flanks which were marked, plain against the thin skin, with enormous scars . . . the slashes made by razor-sharp horns.**

**The rider pulled his mount up, sat rubbing his chin as he gazed across the midnight hills. The nearest of the boys lay rigid, strangling a gasp; he was barely a yard away. Luis was his name and he was the ringleader of the gang. He was born lucky (all the other boys said, admiringly) for he belonged to no one and nobody gave him orders; all they knew was that he had something special inside him, something they had to follow. They were sure he was destined for great things.**

**Just now, he was face-down upon an anthill.**

**He could feel the tickle of minute feet crawling over his cheeks, his chin, his nose. And now a bite stung fierce as acid on the tender skin of his lower lip. He dislodged the ant with his tongue, dug his fingers into the ground; and suffered as more bites burned his cheek and neck. But he never moved, never made a sound.**

**The seconds ticked by, each an agony, fiery as the bite of an ant: one . . . two . . . three . . . And now Luis could hear the regular snuffle of the rider's breath, a thick comical sound. With every inhalation, it was a piglet's squeak; with every exhalation, a hoarse grunt like that of a boar which scents a truffle. By this sound, Luis knew the man's name. Emilio Horrila, he was. Mother of God, it was the foreman of Dona Isabella's rancho! Boys like Luis were the bane of his life, and he had made it his quest to be the bane of boys like Luis. They called him El Manso--the Cowardly Bull--and he called them los garbanzos, and cursed them. He had sworn that one day he would catch them, truss them soundly in rope, haul them to the hacienda and have them branded like bull-calves.**

**Horrila El Manso. Night after night, he patrolled Dona Isabella's pastures, waiting to fulfill his oath . . . but the fields she owned were too wide, and the boys too clever to be found. Night after night, El Manso was doomed to frustration.**

**Squeak. Grunt. Snuffle. Snuffle, squeak, grunt. Luis wept to himself, knowing that if El Manso caught him tonight, he was in for the beating of a lifetime. Strapped across his shoulders, he carried incriminating evidence . . . nothing more than a cape cut from an old sugar-sack, but it was dyed a crude red and that was enough. When El Manso saw it, his rage would know no bounds.**

**A lifetime went by. Finally the man on the horse groaned out a yawn, reined his mount about. They cantered away across the hillside, with Horrila nodding in the saddle. He had been surrounded by his quarry, but he had been too drowsy to see them.**

**Behind him, the boys collapsed in gales of stifled laughter. "Let's go," Luis whispered. He swiped ants off his face, rallied his troops. "They're waiting, my friends."**

**A mile further, they found what they sought.**

**A herd of Dona Isabella's prize beasts was grazing across her dehesa . . . her bull pastures, left untamed as primeval Spain in the era of the Altamira cave painters. And these bulls resembled the bulls of the cave paintings: long and low and raking, with great humped shoulders bristling with muscle and hair, with polished horns that swept forward to needle points. They were year-old calves, destined for the bull-ring. As wild bulls had grazed throughout Spain for thousands of years, they wandered free across their wide dehesa; something in the grass of Andalucia gave them strong bones, wind and endurance beyond the mete of all other bulls; something in their breeding gave them courage beyond belief. They were as savage as if they had never set eyes upon mankind.**

**This was the essence of their upbringing: that no one worked them before they set foot in the bull-ring. They learned so quickly that, in the half-hour of an ordinary bullfight, they could master every trick a matador could conjure. The longer they were played, the more dangerous they became. And a bull which had been caped in the fields came to the bull-ring armed for murder.**

**Luis and his cohorts knew this, but did not care. They moved quickly; El Manso would be back soon. With clucks and mysterious sounds, they tempted one calf away from the rest--further and further, until it was more nervous than curious and it breathed in steaming snorts. As long as its brothers were nearby, it had remained calm. But separate one bull from the herd and all its battling instincts would emerge.**

**It halted on the crest of a hill, beneath the spreading boughs of a paradise tree. Somewhere an owl hooted a warning, and the bull became a statue: mottled marble, pink-streaked at mouth and nose, and with horns that gleamed dead black. A splash of white like a flying bird was on its crest--just where, in a true corrida, the sword would go in to end the fight. That was the fate that awaited this bull. But it did not know its fate.**

**It saw a boy stepping out to face it. An unarmed boy. The boy called out in a quavering voice, "Hola, toreo! Hoy, hoy!" With both hands, he was fumbling at something he carried across his back. The bull pawed the ground and snorted. Its head went down, its shoulders lifted, its ear flicked. The boy jerked backward a step, and then the bull hesitated and the boy stood his ground. He pulled and he spread his arms and there was a billow of cloth, rippling in the night, moving, moving--and the bull charged.**

**The other boys watched the miracle happen.**

**Gawky Luis straightened, sweeping the cape out with dreamlike elegance. His feet came together with a click of heels, his shoulders squared and his chin lifted. To his thin face crowned by a cowlick of hair, came an expression learned from watching a hundred matadors. His cape flared like the wings of a butterfly. As he had learned, from watching a hundred bullfights, he turned with the cape and the bull swung around him. Following the cape, trying to catch it. Never seeing Luis as it went past.**

**All the boys cheered. The bull pulled up twenty feet away from Luis. It wheeled. Straight as a railway train, it charged again. Luis drew it with a flick of the cape, and again it chased the cape and ignored the boy. The moment seemed remote to him, unreal--too perfect to be believed. But the bull was real, he had felt the heat of its skin; the wet blast of its breath had branded him through his threadbare and ragged shirt.**

**A third time. As if in a dream, Luis stood poker-straight and the folds of cloth flashed, opening out at waist-height in a breath-taking flourish. And he turned the bull so closely that its horn slid smooth as stone along his side, and at the culmination of the pass it stumbled and fell to its knees.**

**It was a hallucination, a mirage.**

**"Luis, Luis!" A piercing whisper woke him from his trance. He blinked and found half a dozen boys making frantic signs. Luis looked around--and ran for his life.**

**When Horrila El Manso passed by, snorting hard through his nose, he saw nothing on the hillside save a bewildered bull under a paradise tree. The boys had scattered to every quarter of the compass; already they were halfway back to the Guadalquivir. They would meet on the far side of the river, slap each other's backs and relive their grand adventure. While Luis, their Luis, whom they knew was meant for great things, would stand like a dummy, daydreaming at midnight. "Voy a ser torero" he would murmur, over and over. It was the hope that lit his existence: "Voy a ser torero, voy a ser torero."**

**_I will be a bullfighter._ **

**#**

**"Have you ever attended a bullfight, Duncan?"**

**"Once or twice, Dona Isabella, while I was in Toledo." Duncan MacLeod bowed his hostess through the gate. Fastidiously, she whisked her skirts away from a puddle of filth in the street. "It seemed a sorry sport to me, wicked cruel to its horses and with a bad end for the bull. Maybe if the beasts had a chance, it would be more of a fight?"**

**"Ah, but you miss the point. Once, the corrida was a sport where noblemen on horseback jousted against wild bulls . . . there was much skill to it, but little danger to the man. Only the horses suffered." Dona Isabella flicked her fan to illustrate the point, miming a blow to the belly. Then she pretended to fall dead, the shut fan pressed to her forehead; MacLeod caught her. And she cast him a flash of a smile. "Today, though! Great drama. When a modern matador steps into the ring, he is on foot. Mano a mano with his adversary, armed with his cape--and his bravery."**

**"And a sword, Dona Isabella."**

**"Which he uses only to dispatch the bull." She rose on tiptoe, arm out, jabbing down with her fan. "But his cape and his wits, those are his true weapons. Think of the killing blow--it goes in from above, between the shoulders of the bull, right behind the horns. No matador could land such a blow on an unmastered beast. To use his sword, first he must employ his cape to defeat the bull." She lowered her voice. "Our bullfighters of Spain are no cowards, Duncan, not one of them is without his scars. Imagine yourself, a mortal, facing those horns. They have a courage that we immortals might envy."**

**"It's a corrida we're to see tonight, isn't it? A local bullfight."**

**"A novillada rather. That is an amateur fight--but I think you'll like it more than the corrida. The bulls for the novillada are not killed, but used many times. Indeed, some become so wise that we say they understand both Spanish and Latin and will filch coins right out of the pockets of any man rash enough to step into the ring."**

**"Well, I shall look forward to it, then."**

**Side by side they promenaded down the street. Men swivelled as Dona Isabella passed, turning like puppets on her string; their stares were frank and bold, and they snapped their fingers and uttered loud, heartfelt compliments. She kept her eyes downcast modestly, but her mouth had a wry twist.**

**"Too many men," she murmured, for MacLeod's ears only. "They see a rich widow, with properties in Barcelona and Toledo."**

**"They see the fairest woman in all of Spain," MacLeod contradicted her.**

**"They see the proprietress of Ganaderia Viuda de Ramon Alavedra: the bull ranch of the Widow Alavedra. Forget me! It's my business they want. Any one of them would marry the bulls from my pastures in a moment." And she turned her back on the whistling men, looking upon MacLeod alone. "No, it's been too long since I walked with an equal."**

**The novillada would take place in the village square of Sobaquillo. Here, wagons had been pulled up to form a barrier, and a few segments of wooden fencing completed the impromptu bullring, around which a cheerful crowd lounged; farmers swigged wine from their botas, and hawkers sold bread and oranges. Upon the wagons, decorative lines of senoritas perched like cooing doves. From their bare toes to the napes of their necks, they were covered by skirts and petticoats and knitted shawls, but each and every one had a flower--a paper flower, brilliantly colored and full of frills--pinned on the crown of her forehead, right where she parted her jet-black hair.**

**MacLeod handed Dona Isabella up into place on a wagon. She kissed her fingertips to him, and opened the basket she carried over her arm. Within was a little pillow, upon which she settled herself . . . and there was a pitcher of sangria, along with marzipan and sharp cheese and membrillo, the tart burnt-orange confection made from quinces which was a speciality of the area.**

**With the sangria, she toasted her companion. So handsome, such a gentleman! this douce and dapper Scotsman whom she had encountered in Toledo. With his hair slicked back, and his pencil-thin mustache just so. A fellow immortal too, with an air of danger about him which Dona Isabella found irresistible. How could she not have invited him home?**

**Home with her, but not into her bedroom. No, the civilities had to be observed. They spent every day together--but she passed her nights respectably, alone in her dead husband's bed. While MacLeod slept in a room at the local inn . . .**

**. . . So far.**

**Someone was playing a guitar, with a romantic tzing tzing tzing. The senoritas swayed and patted their hair. A file of maletillas--aspiring bullfighters, in cheap and flashy suits--strutted into the ring and swept out their capes. Every manner of man seemed represented in their number: tall or short, rotund or stork-legged, from farmers with straw in their hair to the village barber whose mustaches were enormous and immaculate. A band began to tune its instruments, the spectators cheered. "What do you think?" asked Dona Isabella, to MacLeod.**

**MacLeod eyed the maletillas and their fluttering capes. "They look like a load of butterflies in the spring," he growled.**

**One of the maletillas bowed especially low as he passed--making a peculiar wheezing sound, like that of an aged and breathless accordion. "Three cheers for the good senora, benefactress of Sobaquillo, who donated the cows for our corrida today! May God divide the luck, Dona Isabella!"**

**"May God divide the luck," she echoed. "Emilio Horrila, foreman of my bull ranch," she added, sotto voce, to MacLeod. The band struck up a tune, and the first "bull" swept into the ring.**

**"That's a cow," MacLeod remarked.**

**"Yes, one of my four-year-old cows, and small, but very brava. A brave cow will breed brave bulls. Ah!" The cow had taken one look at the waiting maletillas, and dove at them, hooking right and left. They scattered, and for several moments the ring was a chaos of flapping cloth: on its edges every last man was desperately swinging his cape, in the middle every last man was fleeing from the cow. The cow was plunging, tossing men about like straw dolls. When they got their capes just so, she ran gaily in straight charges, knowing better than they how to play this game. When they did not (and this was most of the time) she taught them their lesson, whacking them at will; the tips of her horns were capped with leather, but still she could deal a mighty blow. At last all the men had been dispersed or sent diving in terror under wagons, and the cow made a victory parade of the ring and then trotted peaceably back to her pen.**

**"Thus we see," Dona Isabella murmured, "that a cow is more than equal to the male of the species."**

**Never taking his eyes from the ring, MacLeod leaned very close and whispered, "Perhaps they do not know how to woo her."**

**His breath was warm against her cheek. She rapped his knuckles, saying, "The proprieties, senor! Remember that we are in public."**

**Now a knock-kneed roan bull was ushered into the ring--a big beast, far more formidable than the cow, with uncapped horns that gleamed like twin daggers. A lone maletilla strode forward, uttering a snort with every step as he advanced to meet his fate: it was the foreman, Horrila. When he drew himself up and spread his magenta-and-yellow cape, he grunted loudly. When he swirled the cape, it was with a creak like the bellows of a smithy. The bull eyed him and pawed the ground, perhaps puzzled by the noise. Then it whisked up its tail and charged.**

**The puffing of the foreman's breath could be heard clearly as he caped the bull. A shrill whistle, escaping his lips, was also heard as the bull wheeled and dived back at its target. Horrila, mouth open, went up on his toes and swayed precariously--his free arm wind-milling in the air--and presto! his foe steamed past without touching him, though its horn came within a hair of his rump. He collapsed panting, hands on knees, while the bull slowed and halted in confusion. The cape dragged in the dust. The crowd went wild--with laughter, alas. And poor Horrila turned in circles, looking for the joke.**

**With the seat of his embroidered pants, cut clean across, flapping in the wind.**

**His underwear was threadbare and none too clean. Only for an instant was it visible to the innocent senoritas of Sobaquillo. Then he discovered what the crowd was laughing at, and with a despairing squeak he whipped his cape around and covered his bottom with its folds. The rigid smile on his face was intended to convince all that this last move was mere coincidence. But even as he relaxed, he spotted the bull. It had turned, and was readying itself for a fresh charge.**

**Horrila tottered, caught between warring impulses: to keep the cape where it was, or to use it to save himself from the bull? Providence intervened when a dozen rescuers ran into the ring, waving old blankets in the air. Then the foreman knew himself saved by a benevolent God. He breathed out a gusty sigh, and began to make his bows.**

**Behind his back, the good people of Sobaquillo grinned from ear to ear; those under his eye all assumed solemn faces--but their lips quivered. MacLeod was snickering behind his hand. "Be kind to the poor man," Dona Isabella hissed, "at least he has courage." She plucked the red rose that was pinned behind her ear, and tossed it down, calling, "Bravo, Don Emilio!"**

**Hearing himself addressed with such honor, the foreman stiffened as if galvanized. An alarming sound escaped, as he sucked his belly in; there was a new gleam in his eye. It was a gleam of pride, of veritable machismo. With one hand holding the cape in place, and the other clutching the rose to his heart, he strode like a conqueror from the ring.**

**Meanwhile his rescuers were taking turns to cape the bull. They were obviously boys from the street, too lowly even to call themselves maletillas; they had no suits of lights like the other participants, but had decorated themselves with marigolds and daisy-chains. Their caps were pulled low and dirty kerchiefs were tied across their faces. From the catcalls which rose, the spectators assumed these were interlopers from some other village. One of the boys sat upon a tiny donkey, and now he kicked his mount into a trot and couched a makeshift lance under his arm. "Ho! Ho!" he cried, citing the bull. The bull put down its head and charged, and another boy flung out his cape and distracted it, just in time; even as he did, the lad on the donkey scraped the point of his lance along the bull's ribs. Then he fell off the donkey, and broke the lance in two.**

**"Get those clowns out of the ring!" bellowed the maletillas of Sobaquillo; Horrila's voice was the loudest of all. But Dona Isabella held up her hand. "Let them have their moment," she commanded. "They know enough to pic the bull. Let the fight go on."**

**"When I saw that done in an actual corrida, the bull always got the horse," MacLeod remarked.**

**"Yes," she whispered. "But these are good boys, they look after borrowed goods. And they know the value of a donkey."**

**"The boy who drew the bull away--"**

**"I know," she said, "I know. I don't know who he is, but someday he will be immortal."**

**Meanwhile the drama continued. The bull--undaunted by the bleeding scratch on its hide--was making charge after charge, and with every charge, a different boy tried to cape it. Few of the boys seemed to know what they were doing: they tripped over their capes, mishandled the bull and fell down bruised by the flats of its horns . . . but no one was actually gored. Now, after an exchange of signals, they scattered to the edges of the ring. There they waited, spaced at regular intervals around the barrier, nervously clutching their capes. One boy--the boy who might someday be an immortal--was left to face the bull.**

**He was not carrying a cape. That was the first thing MacLeod noticed; but having seen bullfights before, he knew that the two sticks the boy held were barbed darts, meant to be set in the shoulders of the bull. Except that these were not properly made, being merely whittled sticks of peeled wood; and the boy was not a matador, nor was this a real bullfight . . . the only problem was, no one could tell the bull these things. The bull, vast as a monolith in a blaze of merciless Spanish light, with a billow of Andalusian dust floating about its horns, was no plaything.**

**The boy--holding his sticks so tightly that his knuckles could be seen, stark white, at twenty paces--cited the bull. The bull charged. As it did, the boy ran headlong to meet it. And suddenly the boy's gait was as sure as the flight of a swallow. Boy and bull came together--MacLeod leaned forward abruptly, closing his fists--the bull lowered its head, hooking upward to gore--and even as it did, the boy had somehow avoided the horns, the boy was standing tall, swaying, as the long humpbacked bull slid past with a swish of its tail. As their paths crossed, bull and boy had come together to form a perfect picture, something that stopped the heart with emotion.**

**The bull galloped away, drawn by another boy's fluttering cape at the far end of the ring. And the peeled wooden wands were hanging from the bull's shoulder. The first boy had planted them there as the bull rushed past.**

**"Look at him!" Dona Isabella exclaimed in MacLeod's ear, under the tumult of applause that had erupted in all quarters. "He has valor, coolness, nerves like steel wires--and more than that, he knows how to _think_ while the bull is charging him. I tell you, I have seen a thousand maletillas who had fought bulls in vain for ten years, and this stripling already knows more than they do."**

**"What's he doing now?"**

**"Placing his second pair of banderillas. Oh--" rocking forward in her seat, "--bravo! Bravo! Oh, see how he tricked the bull past him with only the slightest lifting of one foot! I tell you, this boy will go places!"**

**"The bull just ripped his shirt half off," MacLeod commented. "I think he's bleeding."**

**"That merely goes to prove he has cojones! See, he is shrugging off the wound. There, the third pair of banderillas." Dona Isabella placed a hand on MacLeod's arm, gazed at him with eyes that shone starry bright. "The first act: picing the bull, followed by cape work. The second act: banderillearing. Now for the finale. Let us see if the lad has a muleta."**

**"Yes, he does, but he gave it to that other boy. Over there--the one with a cape in his hand, and another folded over his arm?"**

**"No, no, no. The cape is magenta and yellow, and it is large. The muleta is what you foreigners call a cape. I've seen English paintings of bullfighters. Que verguenza!" And she made a delicate face. "Always with the red 'cape' in their hands. Well, that little red thing that you call a cape, it is a muleta. I tell you, the English do not know the front end of a bull from the rear."**

**The muleta in the boy's left hand was a square of crudely dyed sacking. But it was what he gripped in his right hand that made MacLeod stiffen. "Is that rusty thing . . . ?"**

**"Well, well, well. Wherever did he get his hands on a matador's sword?"**

**The boy was passing the bull through a series of beautiful arcs. In his hand, the notched and rust-splotched sword (he must have picked it up in a garbage dump) was held as proudly as the finest Toledo steel. As for the stained sackcloth muleta, it might have fallen straight from Heaven. For he used it as an angel might use its wings. It seemed charmed; the bull's eye was unable to look away from it, the bull's nose followed it as if buried in its folds. Every flick of the boy's wrist sent the bull curving in a fresh direction: horns gleaming, long back twisting and supple, and the wooden darts hanging in pairs from its shoulders clattering and clacking like castanets. Indeed, the lad might as well have been invisible for all the animal noticed him.**

**Came the moment when the boy drew back and seemed to steel himself to commit some perilous act. The bull, dazed by the long series of passes, had halted about six yards off and faced him foresquare; it appeared almost frozen in place. The boy, his face still masked by the dirty handkerchief, raised and dangled his crude muleta. Then he turned, standing sideways, and raising the sword in his right hand, he sighted the point of the blade toward the bull. Like a salute.**

**Horrila the foreman bellowed indignantly as he waved his arms for his men. "Drag that beggar boy away before he damages Dona Isabella's valuable property!" But Dona Isabella herself lifted one lace-gloved finger, signaling for attention.**

**"And now the moment of truth," she called. "Let us see what he can do."**

**Silence fell. Red dust rose in waves from the bone-dry surface of the arena; the sun shone down through a haze like hanging blood. The boy in the mask made the merest flirt with his shabby bit of sack. And the bull charged.**

**The boy did not flinch a step. Only, as the bull bore down upon him, he flicked the sack sideways, across his body--and the bull swerved, obediently following the muleta. The end of the muleta twitched, and the bull dropped its head, hooking at the cloth. As the beast passed in front of him, the boy stood tall, leaning in over the horns. There was a flash of the sword as he struck. From above, smack between the shoulders, just so: perfection.**

**Then the sword bent, straightened explosively, leaped end over end like a spring released from tension. The boy staggered back, the sword sailed through the air, the scrap of dyed sack flew out of his hand. MacLeod (whose eye had been trained by years of fighting) had seen what had happened: the sword had hit bone and rebounded . . . wrenching the boy's wrist as it did. The boy fell back several steps, holding his arm out at an awkward angle; the bull had gone right past and was now running along the edge of the ring. And a great sigh rose from the spectators: "Luis. Luis. Why, it's young Luis, Luis the Orphan!"**

**For the boy's handkerchief had come off.**

**Dona Isabella, who did not associate with the riff-raff of Sobaquillo, had never set eyes on Luis the Orphan and thus merely shrugged with disappointment over the bungled sword-blow. However, half the audience promptly erupted into catcalls and the other half into a spirited roar of approval. While Horrila the foreman rushed bellowing into the ring.**

**"Why, what is this?" Dona Isabella called, seeing her employee collar this unfortunate and injured urchin. "Senor Horrila, surely such violent manhandling is not required--?"**

**Horrila, grunting, was dragging the boy bodily toward the barriers. Now he made a strangled roar so alarming, it put one in mind of tigers and bears. "Good Dona Isabella, you don't know this lad. He's a notorious criminal, hardened in every sort of mischief. Good only to steal oranges and go begging in the streets. You wonder how he acquired such skill with the cape and muleta? It was from caping your own prize bulls in the pastures at midnight!"**

**"This innocent boy?"**

**"This fiend from Hell! For years I've been trying to get my hands on him. And now--" cracking the knuckles of his horny hands with a sound like rifles going off, "--now--now he'll pay for his crimes! I'll lock him in your stables with the rest of the animals, and make him work off his debt to you. This fine garbanzo bean!"**

**#**

**Garbanzo beans were the food of the poor, but the garbanzos served at Dona Isabella's table were no mean fare: they had been stewed since dawn with salt meat and potatoes and cabbage, and piping-hot sausages had been chopped into the pot. Served with thick slices of veal, they resembled the food of the gods. They were preceded by almond soup, and followed by cake and melon slices and little cups of excessively strong coffee.**

**"I've inquired about the boy," Dona Isabella remarked over her coffee. "Luis el Huerfano, Luis the Orphan--he has no other name. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. Who were his parents? Only God and the Blessed Mary can answer that. What is he destined for, everybody asks? Some say for purgatory, others vote outright for Hell. But everyone agrees on this: in a just world, he would be a matador."**

**"Will you help him?" MacLeod asked.**

**"Certainly I'll keep an eye on him. Meanwhile Senor Horrila has him locked up in the storeroom. A diet of dry bread and hard work will do him no harm." She toyed with her coffee, licked the rim of the cup with a small pink tongue while her black eyes opened wide at MacLeod; and when he set down his own cup with a clink and reached for her hand, she smiled and whisked out of reach. "Would you like to visit him?"**

**Her house was like every other house in Andalusia: the first floor was given over to stables and storerooms, the second floor contained the living apartments, and above this was an attic open along one side to the air, where garlic bulbs and tomatoes, eggplants and onions were hung up to dry. One thing alone hinted at the wealth of this house's owner: she had replaced the wooden window-shutters with real glass, imported from Barcelona. The talk of the whole town, almost the scandal of all Andalusia, those wonderful windows; the only glazed windows ever seen in Sobaquillo. As clear as ice-water off the mountains! Now Isabella and MacLeod walked downstairs together, and stars shone upon them through these extravagant windows.**

**Penned in the stables, with a steer beside it to keep it docile, was the bull which had almost met its end that evening. It dozed with its nose in the manger, indifferent to the sword-wound on its shoulders and the other small nicks and scratches of the fight. MacLeod and Isabella looked in on it, and then walked by lantern-light across the stableyard. Off the gate, at right angles to it, was a small storehouse whose door could be locked. It was locked now; she unlocked it, and MacLeod held the lantern high as the door swung open.**

**There was the boy, huddled on a flour-sack, without so much as a candle to keep him company.**

**He started awake. The first thing he saw was her face: her skin snow-white, her eyes ebony-black, her lips blood-red in the dazzle of the lamplight. Like the beautiful stepmother in a fairy-tale. And she stooped over him, with a finger to her lips, saying, "Don't be afraid. Would you like to know a secret, Luis?"**

**"Who are you?" whispered the boy.**

**She smiled, and the mantilla of black lace that floated from the comb in her hair was not blacker than that hair; but blacker than her shining hair were her large and lustrous eyes. "Yes. That's the secret: who are we? That's the question only time can answer."**

**"Are you a bruja? A hechicera?"**

**"A witch? Why yes, I am. Watch this," she said. She bent so close that he could barely breath, and drew off her lace gloves. The nails of her fingers were long and shone like polished sea-shell--and they were as sharp as shell knives. She drew the forefinger of her right hand along the tender flesh of her left wrist. A line of scarlet welled up. Then she wiped the blood away and let him watch her heal.**

**"You must never tell anyone," she said, breathing the words against his ear.**

**He gulped.**

**"Never tell a blessed soul. Not till your dying day."**

**She stepped back slowly, looking at him with solemn eyes.**

**"You must be an angel," Luis ventured. She had to be; nothing else could be so lovely. She even smelled of roses, like the holy saints in the village priest's sermon--saints recognized after they had been martyred, for their coffins filled miraculously with the fragrance of roses. "Have you come to carry me away to Heaven?"**

**"Ah, poor boy." At last she smiled reluctantly. "Well, flattery will get you anywhere." And she stood aside, motioning him toward the open door. "I know I'll regret this later . . . but very well. Go, my child."**

**For a long moment his gaze drank her in, while the blush in his cheeks spread and covered his whole face; even his bobbing adam's apple turned a painful scarlet. His hands wrung one another in self-consciousness. Then he blurted out, "I think you're beautiful!" and bolted past her, out the door.**

**The echo of his footsteps died away, thudding down the rough cobbles of the street outside.**

**"Was that necessary?" MacLeod inquired.**

**She merely shrugged. "Perhaps. If I can frighten him into behaving, perhaps I can find him a job in a butcher's shop. Then he can practice killing cattle to his heart's content, and be a happy boy. It's a route many have taken to the bullring."**

**"You want him to be a matador? I thought--"**

**"You thought?"**

**"I thought you would teach the boy."**

**Isabella put her hand on MacLeod's arm. "Duncan, in my experience, the immortals who take students always do it from loneliness--and I am never lonely. Come. The hour is late. I'll walk you to the street door."**

**"But I thought--"**

**"All this thinking! You thought you wouldn't be going back to the inn tonight, is that what you thought? You thought, perhaps, I might smuggle you up to my room?"**

**"I did think that," MacLeod admitted, with a sudden twinkle in his eye. They were at the door now, the street only a step away. He caught her hand, and raised it playfully to his lips--bowing over it, while his gaze held hers. "But then I also thought you were just a little lonely. And you have just denied that too. Was I wrong about everything, querida?"**

**"I think you are seldom wrong where women are concerned," said Isabella. She freed her hand, turned him around to face the door, and gave him a little push. "But one has one's reputation to consider, you see. And so, good night, Duncan!"**

**#**

**Imagine Spanish sunshine--harsh as a forge-fire's glare. Light in which color lies thick as puddles of paint, every shadow is stark black and every line seems etched into the surface of the canvas that is the world.**

**Imagine the plains of Andalusia baked brick-red by this unforgiving sun. While the marshes slowly dry and the migrating birds wing away to Africa and the fighting bulls on their ranches stride like conquerors across the wasteland. In the village inn, passing muleteers sat lounging on chairs against the stable wall, watching their animals browse, and discussed the charms of Rosalita, the local prostitute; one pesada a time was the going rate, or if you could get a holy medal that had been blessed by the bishop of Toledo, she would accept that in lieu of cash.**

**Imagine a stout figure creeping toward the corner of the inn wall, tiptoe by tiptoe. He had one hand pressed over his mouth and the other pinching his own nose shut, for this was the only way he could avoid wheezing and groaning; for this was Horrila. Horrila hunting his prey. And now with a quick forward dart of his head he took a look around the corner . . . into the dusty alley behind the inn.**

**In the alley, Luis and his friends were playing at bullfighting.**

**They took turns. One would bend over, making horns of his hands, and charge; another would mime passes with a sugar-sack. Luis, chattering, was the heart and soul of the party. He was reliving his triumph in the bullring. Every pass and step had been recreated, while his friends clapped their hands in rhythm. Just now, though, he was lampooning Horrila.**

**He strutted across the cobblestones, hands tucked under his armpits, flapping his elbows vigorously and emitting appalling squeaks and squeals. The sugar-sack cape, caught in the crook of his arm, dragged behind him. "Here I am, see what an important man I am--no, no man, but a maletilla--no, no maletilla, but a matador! Ah, how I turn and wink in the sunshine! Watch me twirl my cape." (The cape flapped.) "A flawless veronica! How the senoritas must all be looking at me: I, El Manso the Great. I have a carnation for every one--now my foe stands before me--my fine cape will mold the bull as a sculptor's knife molds the clay, yes indeed--valgame Dios! The beast's _alive!!!_ Oh, someone save me now!"**

**Luis flung the sack over his head, clapped both hands to the seat of his pants, and sat plump down in the dirt of the alley--while his followers fell over howling with laughter.**

**"Wait, wait, I did that on purpose--it's part of my plan for an improved veronica--Santa Maria, I hope no one notices my pants are split in two-- I'm sure they didn't. But how to get out of here before anyone sees?" And he began to hitch his way backwards across the alley, his rump bumping merrily in the dirt.**

**Horrila saw his moment before him. He rushed out of his hiding place.**

**"Got you!"**

**Luis yelped. He was hauled upright by one ear, like an errant puppy. His friends scattered and took to their heels; but Luis was well and truly caught.**

**"Aha, my fine young rooster," Horrila growled, "where's your crowing now? I'll teach you to flee my hospitality. You'll come back with me and face your punishment like a man--a few canes broken across your back are what learns such as you."**

**"I don't care!" Luis retorted, and cried out helplessly when Horrila twisted his ear. But his face was undaunted. "El Manso--you Cowardly Bull! I spit upon your hospitality." And he hawked and spat in his enemy's face.**

**Horrila's complexion turned purple, his eyes bulged out. "Why, you-- It's to the town prison that you'll go today, you--you garbanzo! But not before you've felt my fist."**

**"I wouldn't do that if I were you."**

**Horrila halted, with his hamlike fist already drawn back, and the boy hanging limp in his grasp. He made a strangled sound deep in his throat as he looked wildly in every direction. "Who speaks--?"**

**"I do," said MacLeod. He had been lounging at the far end of the alley, hidden in the shadows as he leaned against the inn wall. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Now he straightened--a head taller than the foreman, with shoulders like a Basque lumberjack and muscles that strained the thin cotton of his shirt. And a wolfish look upon his face. He sauntered forward.**

**"Senor, this miserable rat is a criminal who has escaped Dona Isabella's custody and must be taken back--"**

**Mac grinned grimly around his cigarette, let his right fist smack into the palm of his left hand. "This young gentleman? How very strange that you say so. For I myself saw the good senora release him, just yesterday evening."**

**"But--but--"**

**"Or didn't she tell you, man? You think that the boy called on the Devil and flew out through the crack of the door, maybe? Let him go." MacLeod stood towering over Horrila, fixing him with a menacing eye. "Let him go. _Now._ "**

**Horrila let Luis go.**

**"Ah, very good," Mac purred. He slicked his mustaches with his thumb, and then rested one hand on the boy's shoulder. "Now on your way."**

**"Make him apologize!" Luis demanded haughtily.**

**A thin fizzing sound as of steam escaping leaked between Horrila's clamped-shut lips.**

**"Quiet, laddy." MacLeod's hand clamped down in a clear warning. He said to Horrila, "Don't bother with this one again. I'll deal with him. Go."**

**Horrila went.**

**Immediately, Luis dusted down the front of his threadbare shirt, and tried to twist out of Mac's hold. "My regrets, sir, for putting you to this inconvenience. Do not trouble yourself further. I am quite unhurt."**

**"You're a holy terror," MacLeod corrected him. "And altogether too sassy for your own good, my boy. Steer clear of Senor Horrila and you'll live longer . . . So you want to be a matador?"**

**The orphan boy's eyes became large and liquid. Suddenly he was very close to Mac, peering up into his face with a wild hope. "Sir! Are you an agent?"**

**"No, no," MacLeod soothed him. Luis' face fell. "But," Mac drawled, "I bear a message from Dona Isabella. Present yourself at her gate tomorrow morning. She desires to test your skill with the bulls."**

**"Sir! I'll be there! I will!" He was wringing Mac's hand, clutching it as if unwilling to let go. "Oh, gracias, sir, a thousand gracias!"**

**#**

**In the fine summer evenings, the young folk of Sobaquillo went promenading. They did this in the village square, the same square where the amateur bullfights were held; but now the cobbles had been swept, and sprinkled with water to lay the dust, and all the senoritas walked round and round, dressed in their very best. They went in twos and threes, circling clockwise, and the young men of the village circled them counter-clockwise. As they passed one another, young men and young girls looked each other over. They smiled. They nodded. One would wink, another express admiration with a bold and hungry stare. Not a word was spoken, though--that would have caused a scandal! But entire conversations were held without a single word.**

**Sometimes this blissful courtship dance went on for upwards of three hours.**

**If a boy and a girl reached an understanding in this way, he would follow her home. Then she would become his novia, and they would be permitted to converse, decently of course, with her on one side of a window-grill, and him standing outside on the street. A few months of these preliminaries, and one might reach that advanced stage of courting in which novia and novio held hands through the window. Then if all went well, he would speak to her father and be admitted into the house; the banns would be announced; marriage would follow. But there was no kissing until after marriage. It was understood by all good girls that kissing was a dangerous adventure, to be attempted only when one's future had been assured by the wedding ceremony.**

**All this, Dona Isabella related to MacLeod, as they made their own promenade. Side by side they walked, but not hand in hand; such a thing was inconceivable save for husband and wife. "Why, I could be charivaried for weeks if anyone thought I contemplated remarriage!" she said. "What a pity! All the young men in town would sing rude verses under your window, my friend, warning you away from me. You would never get any sleep in this village again."**

**"A gamble well worth the attempt," said MacLeod under his breath, and attempted to kiss her fingertips.**

**She struck him with the stick of her fan. "Now, now! . . . This is an age of the proprieties."**

**"You should come back to London with me for a year or two. I thought the English had grown stuffy, but your Spaniards take the cake."**

**"Ah, your English--"**

**"They're not my English."**

**"Oh, indeed, and your dour Calvinist Scots, then! All sermons and no fun. At least we still sing and dance here. I remember," she said, taking a different tack, "I remember when the Moors came here to Spain. I lived among them for a thousand-and-one lives, with a new name for every life. We knew how to embrace love then. Poets wrote endlessly in my praise: they said I was a full moon that triumphed by sheer magic, that beauty had made my eyes like swords and my smile was a lightning-flash. A gazelle unafraid to hunt even the fiercest lions, they called me."**

**"Truer words were never spoken."**

**"And I remember the Romans, and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians who came before them . . . How strange," she remarked, "now that I think of it, that nations come and nations go, but I remember seeing Gaius Julius Caesar fight bulls for sport, as all the rich Roman noblemen did--and when the Moors ruled, they would drive wild bulls off the marshes and face them with lance and dagger, three bulls being loosed against a single warrior, for the entertainment of the caliph's court--and when the Christians came, their brave young hidalgos rode out to joust with the bulls of Andalucia, just as the Muslims and the Romans had before them. It was the pastime of nobility. But now it is the sport of beggars, their way of escaping poverty."**

**"How old are you, Isabella?"**

**"Too young." And she touched her own smooth cheek. "Too old."**

**Crowds of young men strutted past, ogling every female in sight; their red sashes might be threadbare and their pants patched at the knees, but their cotton shirts had been laundered snowy white. Every last youth had his hat tilted at the jauntiest angle conceivable. Some wore a sprig of sweet basil, and some had flowers in their buttonholes. And here was Luis the Orphan! With a workman's cap jammed down over his cowlick, his face freshly scrubbed, and a meaningful look in his eye. As he sauntered by, he gave Dona Isabella a smile full of blinding teeth, thumbed the carnation pinned to the front of his shirt, and hissed, "This morning I stole this from your balcony, senora."**

**Dona Isabella hid her face behind her fan. "Oh!" she whispered to MacLeod. "Oh! My goodness! The stripling thinks I'm in love with him!"**

**Away went Luis, very cock-of-the-walk. Behind him, MacLeod disregarded the conventions and held Isabella up, supporting her by one elbow; she seemed about to collapse in helpless laughter.**

**"Take me home," she pleaded, "before I make a spectacle of myself."**

**Did she but know it, another suitor was lurking in the background, gnashing his teeth over young Luis' bold tactics. It was Horrila the foreman, whose hopes had soared after Dona Isabella tossed him her rose; now he dreamed of wedding the rich widow, lording it over her many properties, becoming the landowner where he had only been an employee. Dressed to the nines and puffing with ardor, he had been stalking her all evening. She had never even noticed him.**

**MacLeod did notice, but he dismissed the whole business as too ridiculous for comment. Instead he tucked Dona Isabella's hand into his elbow, and walked away with her, well content. And he was right to be content, for soon enough Isabella was kissing him behind locked doors. Permitting his embraces, gazing at him with her lustrous eyes half-lidded. Leaning back in the circle of his arms, her lower lip caught between pearly white teeth, as she stroked his shirt-front and murmured, "Tonight, forget my reputation . . . That copita I invited you in for? Let us take it in the bedroom."**

**"Your servants? Your maid?"**

**"My cook goes back to her family every evening, and as for the maid, I have given her the night off. No one will see us," she promised, and put her little finger against his mouth; he kissed it. Then the whites of his eyes showed in shock, at where she patted with her other hand.**

**"Querida," he said, his voice half strangled.**

**"Tsk tsk," she said, unbuttoning him expertly. Petting. Squeezing. Pinching. "I wouldn't want you to lose interest. First we pic this little bull, then we incite him with the banderillas." A sudden scrape of her fingernails against MacLeod's bare belly made him straighten with a gasp, catch her shoulders in a bruising grip. She only smiled and licked her lips. "Then," she said, "the moment of truth, senor."**

**#**

**Much later, in the heart of midnight, a vague sound was heard from Dona Isabella's balcony. If anyone had been there to see, they might have glimpsed two forms rousing in her bed: one rolled languidly, while the other came bolt upright and exclaimed, "Now what the deuce--?" Through the lace curtain which draped the balcony doors, a mysterious figure was seen. It grasped one of Isabella's carnation-pots in clumsy and bear-like hands. But at the sound of MacLeod's voice, it froze and then--with a wheeze like a dying church-organ--began to grope toward the balcony rail. Then Isabella sat up, made a megaphone of her hands, and screamed: "Stop! Stop, thief!"**

**The interloper toppled over the railing and fell twenty feet, landing with a crash of breaking pottery. "That was my foreman, I think," said Isabella vaguely. "And why, I ask? But no matter." Her eyes glittered in the moonlight as she turned to her companion. "Forget it, my hero. Come here."**  
  
  


**Part Two**  


**_Anyone may take life from man, but no one death;_ **

**_a thousand gates stand open to it._ **

**Seneca**  


**The next day:**

**Isabella stepped onto her balcony, with a cup of chocolate in her hand. Naturally she was fully dressed! for though she was shielded by potted plants, still her head and shoulders could be glimpsed from the street. The proprieties must be considered. And yet a woman's balcony was her window on the world: here, one would take siesta, relax and do the mending, or read while keeping an eye out for any interesting passers-by. Or converse with male friends over the railing, without running the risk of scandal. Isabella looked about: a few of the pots had been smashed, earth and crushed greenery was strewn beneath her feet, but all in all the damage was a trifle . . . the price of a most entertaining night. And when she glanced toward the street below, what did she see but a lanky figure, poker-straight and four-square before her gate. It was Luis, freshly washed, in a flat-brimmed hat which was shiny and green with age; and he bore the air of a man who has been waiting since long before dawn.**

**Ah, life was good.**

**She sipped chocolate. Here came another man up her street, but this one was superbly and expensively clad--as nonchalant as if he had not crept out by the back way just two hours earlier. MacLeod. Dear Duncan, so gallant. Catching sight of her on her balcony, he tipped his hat, swept her a bow; and with the toe of one gleaming patent-leather shoe, tipped over a fragment of pottery that happened to be lying on the street.**

**"Senora! Your belongings have suffered an accident?"**

**"Merely a cat in the night," Isabella called. "Good morning, Senor MacLeod. And . . . Luis, was it?"**

**The boy bowed so low, she would swear he shaved his chin on the cobblestones. "Dona! Your servant, your slave."**

**"How sweet. Do please wait, I'll ring for the maid to let you in. We shall take breakfast together."**

**Afterward, she had three horses brought round, and the three of them rode out to her bull ranch. A pleasant hour's ride, it was, on such a lovely sunny day. (With the lad bouncing in his saddle like a sack of turnips.) Isabella watched him fall gradually further and further behind, and took the opportunity to smile upon MacLeod. "Did you sleep well, Duncan?"**

**"Not a wink," said MacLeod blandly. "Something kept me up all night long."**

**"Well these inns are so noisy . . . And did you enjoy your breakfast? I think I caught you frowning down at your dish once."**

**"What did you call that stuff again?"**

**"Why, it was only good migas. I ordered it for the lad's sake, I knew it was what he would like. Wholesome porridge, made from breadcrumbs." (And for an instant she lost herself in memories: when this land had been Al-Andulus--ruled by the Moors--hadn't they called it tharid . . . ?)**

**But beside her, her companion was making a huge disgusted face. "Did it have to be fried up in garlic? With sardines stirred in?"**

**"Didn't you like it?"**

**"And hot chocolate poured on top!"**

**Today was the day long appointed for a special ceremony: testing the latest crop of young bulls. Brave bulls, the offspring of brave cows. This test was called the tienta, and it was the most important event in the ranching season. Today the year-old bulls had been cut out of the seed herds, and driven off their familiar pastures--to be penned in a corral near the ranch-house. There they milled, in an unhappy, jostling bunch, tossing up their horns and bawling while dust rose like storm-clouds, and running round and round like maniacs. What they wanted was to get back to their pastures, so close and yet so far. A bull which had been taken from its home ground had only one desire: to return.**

**All this, Isabella explained to MacLeod, who was a foreigner and who could not be expected to comprehend such obvious things at a glance. She pointed with the stock of her whip, while her fine Barb mare danced beneath her: "See, there is a likely young bull. He will grow up neither too large nor too small, and from the glint in his eye, his vision is good . . . an excellent point, for a bull with defective eyesight will charge crookedly in the ring! Also, he is brave, from the way he tries to climb the bars of the corral and get at the men outside. Senor Horrila, what is the name of that bull-calf?"**

**Today, Horrila the foreman wore a bruise on his forehead, a bristling black shadow on his jowls, and an air of decided injury. He consulted a ledger, reading very slowly, and crushing the pages beneath his moving forefinger. "Dona Isabella, Bravissimo is his name. He is one of La Andorra's calves. You remember that three of her previous get distinguished themselves in the feria at Cordoba."**

**"A good sign. We shall see how this Bravissimo handles himself in the tienta."**

**The young bull they were looking at wore a distinctive mark: a splash of white, like a flying bird ascending toward heaven.**

**Now Dona Isabella's vaqueros cut out one bull and drove it away from the corral. It bellowed and showed the whites of its eyes in panic, caught between two instincts: to rush back toward its brothers, or to light out for the bull pastures? But the vaqueros did not give it time to make up its mind. On their horses, shouting, swinging lassos, they came dashing toward the bull-calf. They drove it this way and that, they made it turn round several times; never did they let it pause. Their job was to disorient the bull, to infuriate it. Then suddenly they all drew off . . . leaving the young bull isolated.**

**There, beckoning it, was the road back to its home ground.**

**In the other direction, a single horseman holding a lance yelled and swung his arm.**

**The bull hesitated. Then its head went down, its tail went up, and off it went--snorting furiously, straight at the vaquero.**

**It would have disemboweled his horse, if he had not swung the lance and knocked it away. Bowled over, the bull scrambled up onto all four hooves, stood shaking its head in confusion. Then it turned and made a beeline for the distant hills.**

**"Bravo," Isabella pronounced, and the vaqueros around her gravely nodded their agreement. And Horrila, squinting hard, wrote down the judgement against the bull-calf's name: bravo, a brave bull.**

**The next bull-calf was already being cut out for the test. Again the vaqueros did their best to befuddle it and make it hopping-mad . . . and again, faced with the choice between safe pastures and a moving target, the bull chose the target and charged the man on horseback. This time, tumbled head over heels, it lunged to its feet and charged a second time; for an instant it seemed about to climb furiously right up the side of the hapless horse. Its eyes rolled and its tongue lolled out, splashing moisture and foam across the saddle-blanket and the horse's flank. Only when the horseman shoved it off with the point of the lance, did it fall back reluctantly and retreat. "Un toro muy bravo," Horrila noted in his ledger: not merely bravo, but a very brave bull. This one would command a great price when sent away to the ring.**

**The next two bulls to be tested were similarly savage, and Horrila purred like a cat with its whiskers full of cream. This year's crop, he was sure, would do him proud. And he smoothed a thumb across his blue-black chin, raising a rasp like that of sandpaper upon coarse steel wool.**

**But the fifth candidate took one look at the horseman, turned with a whisk of its ears, and set off homeward posthaste.**

**"Manso," said Isabella, looking away in disgust. "Senor Horrila, mark that cowardly creature down for a trip to the slaughterhouse." All the vaqueros spat as they gazed after the retreating bull: that one brought disgrace upon all of them. "Manso!" they shouted, shaking their fists at the coward. Not one cried the insult louder than young Luis; but as he did, there was a mocking sparkle in his eye and a meaningful look directed straight at Horrila.**

**Horrila went purple. His breathing became very loud. He glared.**

**"Senora," he asked, between gritted teeth, "why not let the boy try his hand at the testing?"**

**"What an excellent idea," said Isabella. "Luis?"**

**Luis went. Lurching from one side of his saddle to the other, his thighs clamped down on his horse's ribs and his fists strangling the reins--he went. The lance was tucked under his arm . . . its point waving every direction of the compass. But when the next bull was driven out and the vaqueros scattered to leave it facing him, somehow the magic happened: his seat in the saddle became firm, his grip confident on the lance--and as always, the instant he looked into the eyes of the bull, he knew that all was well. For he knew this bull. It was the bull he had caped in the midnight field, the brave bull with the Holy Virgin's own white bird rising across its crested shoulders--Bravissimo, son of La Andorra.**

**"Bravissimo," he whispered, and then, "Bull! Hoy, bull!" He knew he would not have to move to draw the bull; all he had to do, was to exist. "Come, bull!"**

**The young bull came at a charge, dead silent, scarlet-eyed. It was on his lance almost before he blinked, and then it was rearing against the lance, bringing all its considerable weight to bear; only then did it make a sound, and that sound was not a bull's bellow but a lion's roar. Luis shoved the bull off, his horse whinnying in fear and distress. Again, the bull charged. This time he put the steel point of the lance into its shoulder, in the manner of a picador: standing in the stirrups, leaning in with all the force of his arms. The bull was grunting hard, butting the flat of first one horn and then the other against Luis' knee. Blood ran across the white bird-mark. Would the beast never give up?**

**Then the vaqueros were around them, roping the bull and hauling it off by sheer force; three of them, it took. Their eyes were round and their lips moved silently as they worked. They turned the bull, loosed the rope, cracked their whips about the animal's ears and shouted for all they were worth. For an instant, it seemed as if Bravissimo was still determined to fight. It took the combined yells of all the vaqueros to make the animal decide to run for home.**

**Luis looked toward Dona Isabella and the mysterious foreigner MacLeod. The senora was clapping her hands. "Well done, Luis! And that bull, Senor Horrila--do not mark down merely 'muy bravo' against the name of that one. Him, I will send to Seville, to fight in the Maestranza itself. That one is a bull fit for the very king of matadors."**

**#**

**They broke their fast after the tienta was finished, when the sun stood far beyond noontide and Isabella, gently smiling, ushered MacLeod and Luis to an adjacent meadow overlooked by stately plane trees. There, a small miracle had happened: a cloth of thick creamy lace had been spread out on the green grass, set with napkins and plates and gleaming silverware; there was a solemn maid moving about, coffee steaming in a porcelain urn, gazpacho soup laid on for three and bread toasting over the flame of a nearby spirit lamp. "Be seated," Isabella commanded. "Lunch is served."**

**The lunch was perfect, the surroundings idyllic. There was even butter: "A thing as yet unknown to most of my compatriots," as Isabella told MacLeod, "for I have to have mine imported in kegs all the way from Hamburg. Luis, one spreads it upon one's bread. Like this." And she buttered his toast for him, leaning so close that his head swam with the impact of her perfume and his expression became beatifically dazed.**

**This lasted until the sweet biscuits were served, at which time MacLeod remarked, "Excuse us, Dona Isabella," and, lifting Luis bodily to his feet, took his elbow in a steely grip and frogmarched him behind a plane tree. Luis wiggled and squirmed and protested all the way. But MacLeod said, "No more of that, my lad. Let's have what's in your pocket."**

**"Senor?"**

**"Your back pants pocket," MacLeod growled. "Turn it out."**

**"This is an imposition," said Luis, assuming an air of hauteur copied from watching Dona Isabella with her ranch-hands. "You will be pleased to--" MacLeod leaned close to him, narrowing his eyes and smiling very, very slightly.**

**"Yes?" he inquired. "I will?"**

**Luis flinched. Then he reached into his pocket, all shamefaced, and brought out three elaborately chased silver spoons.**

**"I can explain?" he said.**

**"Try it," said MacLeod grimly.**

**"Senor MacLeod, I . . . you must understand, I have nothing, even the hat on my head I borrowed from my compadre Jose's father the flour-merchant--"**

**"Borrowed?"**

**"All right! Stole." Luis squirmed a little more. "But I'll give it back unharmed, I swear."**

**"And the senora's spoons? You plan to wear them for the occasion, return them later this afternoon?"**

**Luis looked pleadingly upward. "Senor, please. Dona Isabella owns the whole town of Sobaquillo, she has in her house a cabinet with a thousand silver spoons. She will never know they are gone. But with the price of them--" his voice had gone hushed, his soul gazed out of his eyes, "--with just these three little spoons, I can buy myself a matador's suit of lights."**

**"And you want to be a matador."**

**"More than anything, senor! More than life itself."**

**MacLeod looked hard at him. Then he sighed and let go. "Luis, we are going to go give these spoons back. And then I will--"**

**A very loud voice interrupted. "Caught in the act . . . just as I thought!" Luis shied back, going pale with anger; MacLeod turned, the spoons in his hand, one eyebrow raised. And Horrila, blustering, grasped Luis' arm and twisted it up behind his back. The foreman was livid with indignation--every word a hoarse strangled squeak. "I knew it! Abusing the senora's charity--stealing, sneaking, lying, tricking--ah, this time the alcalde and the Guardia Civil will have to be called in, a snug jail cell awaits this thief--"**

**"Enough," said MacLeod icily. "Senor, you misunderstand."**

**"Enough indeed." This final interruption came from Dona Isabella, who had approached unheard. There was a cup held daintily in her fingers, and she was nibbling on a section of orange. But now she raised one finger and her voice came trippingly: "Senor Horrila, you make me ashamed with your ranting and raving against my guest the good Senor MacLeod. Do I understand that you think he has purloined my silver spoons? Nonsense!" And she plucked the spoons from MacLeod's hand and made them disappear. "Senor MacLeod's bank managers would die laughing at the suggestion. I would like you to keep your wild accusations to yourself from now on, indeed to keep your mouth closed would be the best course of action. And unhand the boy. This manhandling of a child half your size is also most unbecoming and not what I look for in my rancho foreman."**

**Horrila wilted.**

**"Yes, Dona Isabella," he said meekly. He seemed to have shrunk like a pricked balloon. But then he huffed deep in his chest, and all the joints on his fingers cracked as he flexed his hands. ". . . And the boy?"**

**She patted Luis upon the shoulder.**

**"I have decided. Child, you will work as one of my vaqueros for a little while. Experience with the bulls is needful for you now. When your daily tasks are done, you will practice caping my cows and seed bulls, and later this year--if you work hard and behave--I will buy you a place in a corrida in Cordoba. And if you perform well, other corridas afterward. For I think," said Isabella, "that in this season's tienta I have discovered not only brave bulls, but a matador."**

**#**

**"And now," she said, in the private dining room of her luxurious hacienda, "you have toured the entire property, sir, and seen its appointments and prospects. Don't you admire our beautiful view of the mountains and river? And the ranch-house. I'm very fond of this ranch-house. It is seven generations old, but very modern in style withal. What do you think?"**

**"Oh," said MacLeod, breathing into her ear from behind, "I think the prospects are best when the appointments are entirely removed. But no matter how it is decorated, it is a very fine view--"**

**"The ranch-house? Or me?"**

**"Well, I think you've been around for considerably longer than seven generations. But beauty is always in style." He mussed her hair, and Isabella turned her head and lifted her mouth for his kiss, long and soft. He bit her lower lip, nuzzled her cheek, and all the while he was stroking her with his hands. Combing her long black hair through his fingers, playing with her earrings. Unbuttoning the long double row of buttons that ran up the back of her dress. Kissing her chin, he continued, "And what you have done is a very kind thing."**

**"Don't do that, anyone could come in here and find--"**

**"Find what? Find _these?_ Don't fear, I'll hide your secrets . . ."**

**Isabella let out a little shriek. "By covering them with your hands?!"**

**He lifted his hands, started to step back.**

**"No no no," she scolded, snatching at his hands. "What! Do you want me to catch cold?"**

**"Certainly not," said MacLeod, his voice very deep. "I'll go on then."**

**". . . a kind thing," she mused, somewhat later. "A kind thing? Duncan, you are another Don Quixote. Always wanting to right the wrongs of the world--"**

**"--and tilt at windmills? Is that another metaphor you're using? Well, those are fairly wide skirts and lots and lots of petticoats underneath. Let's see if you're concealing any windmills--"**

**"--eeeh! Stop flipping them! At least," said Isabella breathlessly, "we should continue upstairs in my bedroom."**

**"I'm afraid I can't get my hands off your prospects long enough," MacLeod confessed. "Anyway," he added, nuzzling the nape of her neck, "isn't this Don Quixote's own country . . . ?"**

**"Il Mansha?"**

**"La Mancha."**

**"Il Mansha, 'the Wilderness', as the Arabs named it. Just north of Andalusia, a blighted and desperate country. Here, things are more--hospitable--"**

**MacLeod shrugged. He put his hands on Isabella's waist and hoisted her onto the vast polished slab of the table, sealed her mouth with kisses while continuing to divest her of her 'appointments'. Her frilly lace garter? Snap. Her chaste white cotton stockings? Down they went. He lifted one of her feet, pressed his mouth to the instep, began kissing her long and limber toes. Why was she suddenly struggling to sit up? MacLeod raised his head. "Woman! Can't you lie back and enjoy--"**

**"Shhhhh," she was hissing, wiggling beneath his weight while striving to lay a finger across his lips. "Shh!"**

**MacLeod turned slightly. Footsteps sounded in the hall, coming toward them; the sound could be clearly heard through the dining-room door, which was . . . half-open. Oh, no. Isabella lay stiffly beneath him, clutching at his shoulders. With her skirts somewhere up around her ears. "Get up," she whispered, "quickly, please, Duncan, please--it's the maid, if she finds us--"**

**The footsteps halted, just shy of the door. There was the sound of a sigh, of a bucket being set down. Of water sloshing. Then Isabella abruptly heaved. She covered her own mouth with one hand, making breathless noises. MacLeod looked wide-eyed at her, and realized she was stifling a fit of laughter. Through her fingers she gasped: "No, no, she will not come in, she is merely--"**

**"Mm?"**

**"Washing the hall floor--she does it every evening without fail. We're perfectly safe as long as we don't make a sound. But dearest Duncan, you must let me get up. We can't--"**

**"Can't we?"**

**"Not here--"**

**"You think?"**

**He had relaxed (she realized it to her alarm) laughing himself, soundlessly, with his weight pinning her, his face pressed to her stomach and his hands buried in the folds of her petticoats. Isabella pushed at his shoulders. Then his fingers moved, slid up her naked legs, hesitated at the level of her knees. "Duncan? Duncan?" Those fingers--! They brushed the tender place behind her knees, fluttered along her thighs. "Duncan? Don't you dare tickle--"**

**He dared.**

**"Oooh--augh--eek! Duncan we shouldn't--ah, ah, ah, ah--Duncan we mustn't--oh! You are a devil! Oh, you make me forget every propriety, I cannot resist you. Come up here, Duncan . . . But really, afterwards we must go upstairs and lock ourselves in. Then, you see, we can make noise all night long."**

**#**

**Luis' elation lasted through the afternoon and well into the evening. And then he stepped into the bunkhouse where Dona Isabella's vaqueros were housed, and a dozen Spanish hirelings materialized out of the shadows. They had been lounging on the straw pallets that were their beds; they had been sprawled upon chairs tilted against the unwashed walls; they had come up silently behind Luis, and blocked his escape. Hand-rolled cigarettes dangled from the corners of their lips, they stank of sweat and cattle and ordure; their hats were battered and stained, their jaws stubbled, their faces such that only a mother could love them. Pure and simple, they were thugs. And yet holy medals glittered round their necks and every one of them would have died before taking the blessed Santa Maria's name in vain.**

**Horrila el Manso stepped forward with a triumphant and wheezy chuckle.**

**"Friends, this guttersnipe has delusions. Let us teach him the error of his ways." And as the vaqueros closed in, he leered and remarked, "Him, a matador. Oh, I know what his audiences would call him. El Nino de los Garbanzos--the Kid of the Garbanzo Beans!"**

**#**

**Midnight . . .**

**After the vaqueros were finished with him, they flung the boy into the trough of the stables and left him hanging half-out of the filthy water, to suffer all alone. Luis lay slumped against the rim of the watering-trough. One of his arms hung down, limp and bruised. Blood spread like oil, floating upon the water, and he wheezed with every breath--he wheezed louder than Horrila ever had. Across the stable-yard, he could see the slant of light that fell through the bunkhouse door. He could hear them all laughing and celebrating his humiliation.**

**But presently he heaved himself up, was sick on the edge of the watering-trough, and then fell like a sack to the ground. There he was sick again. Afterward he got himself up on his feet, wiped his mouth, and wobbling like a new-born calf he left that place.**

**No one saw. MacLeod and Isabella were abed in the ranch house by then, knowing nothing. Horrila had just appeared in the bunkhouse doorway, but he did not even look toward the watering-trough; he had forgotten about Luis; with his unlovely face wrinkled up in slowly dawning suspicion, he was adding two and two and wondering why the senora's guest had retired with the senora.**

**No one saw Luis leave.**

**As he went, he saw a moth-eaten saddle-blanket lying by the gate; he stooped and picked it up.**

**Moonlight lit the way for him. It all seemed dreamlike, for Luis was in the state of shock where everything appears unreal and distant and no risk is daunting. Also, he was in great pain. Time passed in a blur. Then he was in the bull pastures, with the blanket in his hand. There was a stick in his other hand, which he must have picked up upon the road.**

**Nothing surprised anymore. It was like fate when he found the bulls waiting, and one of them trotted curiously forward to investigate him.**

**Like fate.**

**It was the young bull named Bravissimo, the bull with the white bird upon its crest. He retreated and the bull followed, already snorting; it knew him, knew what the scent of a man meant. Soon it was trotting, overtaking him. Luis felt his pain fall away, his legs straightened and his arms became strong. He swung the blanket to his left, leaning after it--his whole body becoming a slanted line, taut from his heels to the top of his head, and as the bull charged past, the flat of its nearer horn bumped against Luis' belly. The heat of its breath warmed him. But in his mind's eye, he saw only the picture they made--and that picture warmed him more.**

**He turned without haste, saw the bull turning with him, swung the ragged blanket and passed the bull in a second veronica. The blanket became a cape in his imagination. The stick in his other hand became a matador's sword. The dark hillside, the rutted ground was gone: he was in a bullring, in the height of the afternoon. When the corrida began the sun's heat would strike like a furnace blast, but by the time the last bull was finished the black shadows and stark cold of evening would chill his bones. But the stands were crammed with aficionados, two separate bands were playing and the tumult of applause deafened him . . . as he took the bull through its third veronica. He wore a suit of lights, bright with the gold braid of a true matador. Hats sailed through the air as the crowd went wild. And he would be the greatest matador who had ever lived.**

**Six linked veronicas. ("You were born garbage," Horrila had sneered, snuffling with mirth at his joke, "you will never be more than garbage--you will be garbage until the day you die.") At the end of the series, he finished with a rebolara, the blanket flaring around his hips like a gypsy dancer's skirts; he stood poker-straight, head high, feet together and only his hand moving, as the bull spun around him, with its feet skidding under it. Then he turned and walked away--seeing the bullring brilliant with color and thrown flowers, hearing the screams of the crowd. He knew that the bull would be fixed in place, dizzied by the long series of passes. It would be almost unable to move until he incited it again. Both of them could take time to catch their breaths.**

**Let the crowd, too, catch its breath. Let the band play on. Let the heat of the sun warm his cold bones; Santa Maria, how his heart hammered with excitement, as if it would explode in his chest and kill him where he stood. He heaved in a gasping breath, almost roused from the dream--then he turned and met the gaze of the bull, agitated the cape with a flick of his wrist, and watched the next charge come.**

**("You?" the vaqueros had cried. "Scum like you? What made you think you could become a matador?")**

**He dragged the cape, passing the bull so low that its muzzle bumped against the ground, and he could have leaned down and stroked the flying bird upon its hump. He passed the bull high, watching it leave the ground and swerve upward, rearing into the air, to pursue the lure of the cape. He fell to his knees and swung the cape far sideways, haughtily never rising as the beast thundered by and the white bird was flying high above the level of Luis' eyes. He passed the bull so close that the curved sides of its horns stroked him, hard enough to raise welts where they touched. He imagined the clatter of wooden banderillas hanging down the bull's back, imagined the blood from the bull's shoulder splattering his immaculate suit of lights. He imagined fame. He imagined fortune. He imagined how his name would become immortal.**

**It was as it had been since the beginning of history. Men went out to challenge Nature, and matched themselves against the bulls. In the moment of truth, a worthy matador exposed himself to the horns while making the sword-stroke that killed the bull. Then if the bull charged true, it died. But if the bull chose to swerve, the matador died.**

**He wished this time would never end.**

**Here it was again--the smooth horn grazing his side, seeming to search for him. Luis knew that there was something he had forgotten, that in the touch of the bull's horn lay the clue to something vital and dangerous. But then he had been doing this so long, it seemed he had been born at it and would die this way.**

**Pass after dreamlike pass. The bull's horn caressed his thigh now, touching, lifting, finding him again. With the tips of their horns, such bulls could pick butterflies out of the air, or so they said; cheating managers would sneak into a bull's stall on the morning of the bullfight and shorten the points of its horns, thereby confusing its aim just enough to give the matador an edge. Now the tip of one horn reached for Luis, found his left leg in passing. He felt a violent blow, and then his knee locked and would not bend. It was then that he remembered the old adage: the longer you caped the bull, the more the bull learned. If you worked the bull too long, you would be lucky to escape with your life.**

**Upon the very next pass, he looked into the bull's eye, saw its gaze leave the cape and focus upon him. When the bloodstained tip of the horn hooked toward him again, it plucked the sleeve clean off his arm.**

**He had worked the bull too long.**

**Luis blinked and again he almost--almost--saw the cape in his numb hand for the blanket it was; then he was back in the ring again, a matador again. The moment of truth had come. The bull had gone by and was wheeling, twenty feet away. It halted, facing him like destiny. Its front legs were together and its back feet apart. Time to deliver the killing blow. He showed Bravissimo the cape, saw it follow with its eyes, turned and extended his matador's sword. He cited the bull.**

**It came, true as God's own bull. He led with the cape, stood tall and leaned in as the bull passed in front of him, and if he lost his balance now, he would topple straight onto its horns . . . its horns . . . its blindly seeking horns. O God let it not deviate from the charge! And as the bull went by, he plunged the sword down into the flying bird.**

**The rotten branch in his hand snapped in a million pieces.**

**The shabby blanket left his other hand and blew away in the wind.**

**("You will be garbage until the day you die!")**

**When the bull turned its head and the horn found him at last, he welcomed the death that came.**  
  
  


**Part Three**  


**_Life is but a puff of air._ **

**Andalusian proverb**  
  
  


**"I foresaw this," said Isabella.**

**She stood beside MacLeod, on the cold and windswept hillside. Her vaqueros had summoned her; they had ridden out hours ago. Searching for the boy. Shame-faced, they had admitted their crimes . . . all done in the spirit of innocent fun . . . why, every new hand went through the same rough-housing! How could they have know the tragic consequences?**

**Now the young bulls had been herded away, and Bravissimo the man-killer had been penned at the ranch-house. She had ordered the vaqueros to leave, said that MacLeod was all the help she needed. Slowly, reluctantly, they had ridden away--looking back over their shoulders many times, but they had gone.**

**Only the boy's body remained.**

**The corpse was half-covered by a saddle-blanket. It was the same blanket which Luis had evidently used as a cape--a pathetic bloodstained thing, from beneath which protruded the boy's sprawled legs. She bent and lifted one corner. Why was it taking so long? "Yes, I foresaw it all."**

**MacLeod turned to her, his eyes stark. "Ye did?"**

**Of course one could never tell how long it would take the young ones to return to life. "What? Oh, yes. I didn't think it would happen so fast, though."**

**". . . And you _left_ him with them?"**

**"Nonsense," said Isabella absently. "I didn't mean that, Duncan. As you know. I only meant that matadors always die violently in the end." She shrugged, thinking. "Their own temperaments drive them to it--if they escape the bulls then it's a bar-fight, or some 'duel' in an alley. Or some girl's father or brother will stick a knife in them. They are too hot-blooded, too violent, too wild--gamecocks for every challenge." She let the blanket fall. "Of course these are the very qualities that make a good immortal," she added.**

**Ah. Finally.**

**The blanket heaved. A groan issued from under it. It convulsed. Isabella whipped it off, tossed it aside.**

**"Happy birthday, child!" she said.**

**#Luckily, Dona Isabella possessed many properties. One was a hunting lodge surrounded by woodland, on an out-of-the-way corner of her bull ranch. It was several miles from Sobaquillo, isolated from the local traffic, and there Luis would be safe from those who knew his face. For his death made a very sad tale, a tragedy--why, it was the stuff that playwrights dreamed of! And the story had gone all round the district by the time that MacLeod and Luis arrived at the lonely cabin by the marshes.**

**To Luis it all seemed like a dream. A nightmare, a drunken fantasy. Without protest, he followed behind the crazy foreigner. One thought and one thought alone running in dizzy circles through his head:**

**"I'm not dead?"**

**Now he stood in the doorway of the hunting lodge, feeling less real than ever. Outside the lodge, two horses nickered companionably, head to tail and whisking away one another's flies; inside the lodge, MacLeod was setting down his bedroll and looking critically about. "Not bad," he remarked. "What you can see for dust, that is." He came back to Luis and put an object into his hand. "Drink. You look as if Old Scratch was dancing reels in your skull."**

**The object was a bota: a goatskin bottle with the hair-side turned in. Numbly, Luis tilted it back and shot a stream of wine into his throat--noticing that the foreigner smiled at the sight. "When first I was in Spain," MacLeod remarked, "a friend gave me a bota and I put it to my lips and had a healthy swig. Then I puked out my guts all over my friend's feet, while he stood there and laughed at me. You'll meet him later. Hugh Fitzcairn is his name and I've yet to pay him back for that little prank."**

**"Everyone knows that what comes out of a bota tastes . . . unpleasant," said Luis, smiling tentatively.**

**"Unpleasant! That's a mild word for a pungent experience."**

**"The flavor of goat hair?"**

**"Indeed. It can be called full-bodied, it can be called distinctive, it can be called lingering, but it will never be called palatable. Ah, that's put color in your cheeks, lad. Go ahead, have some more."**

**Luis drank. He tossed the bota to MacLeod, and MacLeod drank. Then he and MacLeod stood there and grinned meaninglessly at each other.**

**"I think," said Luis, "I think . . . all this is a miracle, that's what I think. Senor, are you sure I'm not dead?"**

**"Very sure. But it's not a miracle, lad. If your friends saw you now, they'd call on the Devil and not the Lord."**

**"I remember how the bull gave me a coronado in my knee, here, and in my chest, here. But the marks are gone. But here where I roll up my sleeve is the scar I got cutting fish last year. See?" He held out his arm; it was skinny and the elbow stuck out, but the long white line running across the forearm was clearly visible. "If I'm not dead, what am I?"**

**"Come sit down," said MacLeod. "And bring the bota--you'll need it."**

**Isabella arrived perhaps an hour later. The horses announced her, with a chorus of whinnies to greet her pretty mare; then she was in the doorway, a whip in her hand. "Good afternoon!" she said. "Luis, you look sick."**

**"My stomach is turning, this wine must be bad--"**

**"Don't blame the wine. That is a warning, which you will suffer whenever another immortal approaches." Dona Isabella smiled at him. "My child, you are to be buried in Cordoba, at my expense. As an act of charity, you see. To atone for my great guilt in the matter of your death, and because no one else will give so much as a pesada to buy you a graveyard plot. Duncan, have you told him everything yet?"**

**"Dona Isabella!" said Luis. He jabbed a finger at MacLeod. "He says that he's lived forever, and I will live forever, and you have already lived forever too!"**

**"Well, what am I to make of that?" she inquired, giving her hand to MacLeod; he bowed and kissed her fingertips. "Luis, I am not quite that old yet--"**

**"--naturally I didn't believe him--"**

**"--but you must believe him, we are immortal. All of us."**

**"Oh, if you say it, then I suppose it is so," said Luis after a moment. "But he also says we are all in great danger?"**

**"Because of the Game," she agreed. MacLeod hastened to drape his broadcloth coat across an armchair, and she thanked him prettily and seated herself, whisking her skirts just so. "But this is all a great secret: only we can know how to kill one another."**

**". . . by cutting off our own heads," said Luis doubtfully. "It sounds--difficult."**

**MacLeod was smiling. "It's not so complicated, Luis. If your head--" and he tapped Luis on the forehead, "--is cut off, you'll die the final death." More soberly, he added, "If you cut off the head of another immortal, he dies and you inherit his power. You'll see what that means soon enough. You don't--"**

**"We don't have to have our mouths filled with wild garlic, and be buried at the crossroads?"**

**"I can think of some immortals who would be improved by such treatment," remarked Isabella. "Duncan, I have told everyone that you, my faithful friend, will act as my agent in the matter of young Luis' burial. You have carried the body away to Cordoba, and when you return--perhaps tomorrow?--you will be greatly perturbed, mournful, and full of regrets--"**

**"Terribly full of regrets," said MacLeod obediently, and kissed her little finger. Luis watched them and wondered.**

**"So I have given you permission to use my hunting lodge for as long as you please. You will go out shooting birds every day--I told them you are greatly addicted to sport--and try to forget." She patted his shoulder. "Poor Duncan. How can I console you?"**

**"Well . . ."**

**"Dona Isabella," said Luis, "what became of the bull that gored me?"**

**"Bravissimo? Ah, you owe me one bull for your misdeeds, young man. He cannot be sent to the bullring now, but all is not lost. I will make him a seed bull and he will live twenty years longer than his brothers, and sire five hundred brave sons to make me rich . . . And you, Luis, will stay here with MacLeod, learning, and on no account show your face in Sobaquillo."**

**"Dona Isabella, what must I learn?"**

**"Swordfighting, Luis. Because of the Game."**

**"And this 'Game' is . . . ?"**

**"No one knows," said MacLeod soberly. "You cannot trust all the immortals you meet, Luis. Many will try to take your head and steal your quickening for themselves. That's the Game, lad. It's a Game of swords and blood, of courage and cunning. We only know that in the end, there can be only one . . . only one immortal left standing. And that man will win a prize beyond imagination, they say. No one knows."**

**"No one knows," Isabella echoed in her sweet feminine voice. She touched Luis' cheek, and his head swam, for her perfume dazed him. "For that's the Game. It is a play of machismo, of bravado, of swaggering and honor--a Game for the bravo, from which the brava stand aside. Much like the bullfight, Luis. And as with the bullfight, when the brave bulls who are our immortals strut out into the ring, they all think they'll win in the end! The poor beasts, facing weapons they don't understand, a fight they cannot survive." She made a pretty moue at MacLeod, and pure deviltry was in her eyes. "But when the last matador sheaths his sword, he'll look up and find a matadora awaiting. With weapons he does not understand, challenging him to a fight he cannot win."**

**#**

**"Take the sword."**

**It was a treasure such as Luis had never imagined: a Toledo sword with a braided-steel handle, both the basket and the blade glittering with damascene. MacLeod held it out to him, hilt forward, balancing the back of the blade across his forearm. It was cold to the touch, and as Luis closed his fingers round the grip, he imagined himself in a suit of lights--so embossed with solid-gold braid and embroidery, that it did justice to this magnificent sword.**

**"It's mine?"**

**"It's yours," said MacLeod. "Made by the firm of Mendoza y Alverez. An excellent sword."**

**"Do you have one of those too?"**

**"Here is mine." And MacLeod made a magician's gesture, which produced another sword seemingly from nowhere. Certainly, Luis thought, there was no way any man could conceal an entire sword in that finely tailored coat!**

**It was black sorcery.**

**MacLeod's sword itself was disappointing. It was slender and curving, with a plain white hilt terminating in rudimentary carving. But for the dancing play of light along the blade, there was no ornament to it at all. Besides it looked very fragile. Luis decided he liked his own sword better; certainly his sword would show to better effect in the bullring.**

**"Are we going to learn how to duel?"**

**" _You,_ " said MacLeod, with a swing of his wrist that made his sword twirl and whirl and swoop, "are going to learn to fight."**

**An hour passed. At the end of it, Luis dropped his fine new toy and sat on the ground, gripping his forearm and flapping his wrist to and fro. "Every finger is numb," he complained. "And you have hit me on the neck a hundred times. 'You're dead! You're dead! You're dead!' is all you say. Am I any good at all?"**

**MacLeod sat down beside him. "That rusty old matador's sword, wherever you got it from," he said thoughtfully, "has done you a service. It has made your arm strong. I suppose it's caping bulls at night that gave you that eye for an opponent's moves. And you're fast. Very fast." Suddenly he smiled. "Luis my friend, someday other immortals will size you up, see those elbows and knees and that Adam's apple like a great big target--" and he tapped Luis on the Adam's apple, making him blink with surprise, "--and think you an easy mark. Then you'll give them the surprise of their lives. For you have in you the makings of a fencer."**

**Luis beamed with pride.**

**But the mention of his old sword reminded him of it. He put his head down on his knees and brooded for a moment, then straightened. "Senor MacLeod, that old blade of mine. Can I get it back?"**

**"The old relict? Forget that, Luis, that sword is no good to you now. And you must not set foot in Sobaquillo now. If you're recognized--"**

**"I know, but . . . Please, Senor MacLeod, would you go to my lodging and get it for me?"**

**"Maybe," said MacLeod, relenting.**

**"I would like to keep it," Luis explained. "To remember by. I know that next to this sword it is nothing." His fingers crept out and stroked the intricate hilt of the Toledo sword. "And when I am a matador, I will dedicate my greatest fight to you and kiss the hilt of the sword you gave me, because now that I am immortal I will be able to fight bulls for as long as there are bullfights, and that will be forever." He sighed happily. "With this wonderful sword. But I would still like the other one to remind me of my humble beginnings."**

**But Senor MacLeod was staring at him with a strange and enigmatic expression. "Luis, you don't understand. Haven't you been listening?" And with a few short words he destroyed Luis' entire world: "You can't be a matador now."**

**#**

**"Never in my life," MacLeod said later, to Isabella, "have I seen such fury and self-pity at once."**

**"The poor little cygnet. Still trying to fly like a goose--it hasn't dawned on him yet, that now he is a swan." Together, Isabella and MacLeod gazed through the cabin window: there was the figure of Luis, chopping wood with blows so wild that one would think every log thwarted his matadorial ambitions. Chips flew, and the axe went thock thock thock. She tut-tutted. "I'll talk to him."**

**"Must you?" said MacLeod, and caught hold of her hand. "I was hoping--" as he ran his fingertip across her knuckles and along the back of her finger, "--you had come to see me, not Luis."**

**"Ah, my poor hero." She turned her hand, looking down, and folded her slender fingers around his big blunt thumb. MacLeod tickled the palm of her hand. Isabella let herself sway toward him, like a flower turning to the warm sunlight. Then she shook her head. "You're trying to seduce me again, and I can hardly resist." She freed her hand; his face fell. "But perhaps . . ." she added.**

**"Yes?"**

**"Perhaps afterward, I could whisper into your ear--a time, a place--and you could steal out to meet me tonight . . ? After the boy slept? Would that console you?"**

**"I could live with that," said MacLeod.**

**Satisfied, she left him there. Luis barely looked up as she slipped through the cabin door; she wandered toward him, pretending to watch a butterfly that danced and flitted above her. Beams of sunlight dappled the wings of the butterfly, played across the skirts of her riding-habit. Isabella hesitated, one hand touching the pearl buttons of her bodice. Then she took off her flat-brimmed hat and patted her hair. "Luis?"**

**"Dona Isabella," said Luis despairingly. He faltered at his work, then hurled the axe down and kicked a stick of wood. "I am sorry, I--that is, Senor MacLeod--he said I can't--"**

**"Hush." She fanned him with the hat. "I know. Come walk with me, Luis."**

**They walked deeper into the forest, through grey and tangled cork oak; this was the remains of an old plantation, of trees whose bark had not been harvested for a very long time. "Luis, do you know why he said what he said?"**

**Luis looked at his toes. "I could be very careful and never get gored," he mumbled.**

**"Now, have you ever heard of a matador who wasn't gored? Once a season they feel the horns, most of them." She looked around. "Let's stop here a moment, in this lovely secluded spot. Take this, please."**

**"Senora?"**

**It was a sword she handed him, a French dueling rapier brought out from some hidden recess of her skirts. Luis accepted it, mystified. It seemed that older immortals knew some trick to hiding their weapons, some secret undreamt of by their juniors. Then he opened his eyes very wide, for Dona Isabella was reaching for her buttons again. "Senora!" he blurted.**

**"I have to show you something," said Isabella.**

**"You, you, you're--"**

**She was. She was. Luis backed nervously away from her, pressing his free hand against his hot cheek, and then he froze as if his feet had been nailed to the ground, for she had wriggled right out of her tightly-tailored habit and tossed it aside like a bit of old rags. In her cotton chemise (it was couched with satin ribbon and smocked bewitchingly here and there) she stepped toward him. Raising one finger as she commanded: "Don't you dare move, Luis." Pulling loose the bow at the neck of the chemise. There was a whole row of such bows, all made of filmy Valenciennes lace. When she had worked her way through six lace bows, she shrugged and the chemise fell from her shoulders, catching on the curve of her hips. Isabella hesitated with her fingers on the seventh bow. Then she tugged the ends apart, and let the chemise pool about her feet.**

**Unashamed, she advanced upon the goggling boy.**

**"Don't you dare get blood on my stockings," she ordered him.**

**She took the rapier from his nerveless fingers, and ran herself through.**

**For the next few moments, she knew nothing but pain. She had wounded herself in the stomach, because when a bull gored, the horns usually found the belly or thighs; she knew that Luis knew this. It was important that he understand the lesson. Ah! but how it hurt, how it hurt! She forced her eyes open, moaning, and found that she had such a grip on the boy's hand that his fingers were stark white and his agonized gaze met hers. Then they both looked down and watched her heal.**

**After it ended, she slumped down to sit on the mossy ground, and Luis knelt beside her--pale as death with shock, crossing himself with a shaking hand. And he was staring at her as if she had sprouted hooves and fangs. Isabella smiled grimly. "Touch the place," she told him, and drew his fingertips down to do so. "When the bull gores you, that is what will happen. In front of the surgeon and all the bullring officials. What do you suppose they would do next?"**

**He said something, but in such a low and aghast voice that it went unheard. He shook his head. Then he looked at where his hand was resting--and jumped up, crimson-faced. In a strangled voice he said, "Senora, I--I--I'll fetch you your clothes. Instantly!"**

**Isabella, well pleased with the effect she had on him, took her garments when he brought them. She dressed herself, watching him; he had clapped both hands over his eyes, but she knew he was peeping between his fingers. "There," she said presently, "all better." And when he dared to glance up, she took his hand again and pressed it to the place where she had healed. "Remember," she told him.**

**Again, he blushed as if scalded.**

**"Let's walk back now, Luis." She wound her arm through his, gave him a little tug. "Tell me, do you have a novia?"**

**". . . No, Dona Isabella." He hesitated. "I know that you and Senor MacLeod--"**

**"Hush." She looked him in the eye. "Forget Senor MacLeod. He is Don Quixote, isn't he? Too pure for this wicked world. But you, Luis--you are Don Juan."**

**Then she let go of Luis' hand and ran ahead to the cabin--because MacLeod stood in the doorway, watching them return. And Luis, hanging back, could not help but notice that she went up on tiptoe and murmured in MacLeod's ear, after which Senor MacLeod grinned like the cat that had got the cream. Isabella patted MacLeod's shirtfront. ". . . and please, would you fetch me my mare?"**

**"I'll do it, Dona Isabella!" said Luis, and ran to do as she asked.**

**He got his reward when he led the mare to her. As she took the reins, she let her hand linger on his; she let him lift her into the saddle, and then she leaned down and kissed him lightly. "Good lad. But let's have no more of this 'Dona Isabella', Luis." Against his lips, she breathed, " _Isabella._ Just Isabella."**

**#**

**That night, Luis could not sleep: again and again, he replayed in his mind the events of the afternoon . . . her words, and all that they meant--the way she had healed--the way he had felt as he watched the magic happen. Her cajoling voice, her beckoning smile, the beguiling flutter of her eyelashes. And her body, her naked body. (For after all, he had never seen a naked woman before.) The sight of her body, more beautiful than he could have imagined.**

**Just summoning the image of her body filled him with wild dreams and wishes. He lay wide awake on his bedroll, there on the cold cabin floor, hearing the hoot of owls in the oak wood and the pop of a log on the fire. And what was that? It was Senor MacLeod, rising quietly from his own bedroll; Senor MacLeod's blanket slithering to the floor, and his soft step as he went barefoot out the door. Luis turned over and saw the door closing. He felt a shiver and a chill go across his skin. Of course he knew who Senor MacLeod would be going to meet! What, was he a fool?**

**Nevertheless, after a moment he got up and tiptoed to the door.**

**All his sneaking around the bull pastures did not go for nothing. Luis could walk like a ghost in the dark. With the dark blanket wrapped right around him, he stole across the door-yard. Not very far--just until he heard voices. There. Voices, and the whinny of a horse. Luis stood stock-still, listening.**

**". . . what you did." That was MacLeod's voice. "Was it wise?"**

**"Shush." And that voice--that light, tripping, careless voice--was Dona Isabella's. The sound sent a thrill over Luis' skin. "Duncan, have I ever asked your age?"**

**"No--"**

**"No. My love, however old you are, I am ten times as old; however much you have experienced, I have done ten times more, seen ten times as much, learned ten times all you know. I am older than Spain, older than any country in Europe, and I remember when this continent was a howling wilderness. Believe me, I know what I'm doing."**

**Luis blinked. (Older than Spain?) He heard MacLeod replying, his deep voice rich with amusement: "Well, you certainly know what you're doing right now . . ."**

**Luis slid a step closer.**

**Was that cloth, slithering?**

**And the unmistakable sound of a kiss.**

**Another step.**

**Then Isabella's voice spoke, so close that Luis jumped as if stung by a wasp; then he froze, trembling. He must be all but standing atop them! But he could see nothing; the shadows under the oak trees were too thick. Until he knew just where they were, he didn't dare take a step--what if he trod upon Dona Isabella? He began to sweat.**

**". . . entertain you to learn that I have just received a proposal of marriage?"**

**"What? I mean, from whom?"**

**"My very own bull-ranch foreman," said Dona Isabella demurely out of the darkness. "Emilio Horrila, no less. Huffing and puffing, he proposed to me just today. I think you must have made him jealous."**

**Luis ground his teeth silently in the night.**

**"I _hope_ ," said MacLeod, "you aren't tempted to accept."**

**"Certainly not! Just imagine the snores every night. But grant me my little amusements. To drive men wild is every woman's secret sport."**

**In an affronted tone: "Is that what you've been doing with me? Saying no, never, don't--while, all the time--"**

**"And this hasn't driven you wild?"**

**"And young Luis?"**

**Luis felt faint.**

**". . . Let me deal with young Luis," said Dona Isabella. "I know just how to distract him from his woes. But don't be jealous, my hero, for neither young Luis nor snoring Horrila can satisfy me as you do--why, what's that?"**

**That was a wild snapping of leaves and boughs. That was a shadowy shape legging it for the horizon--while Isabella sat up, exclaiming, and Mac leaped vigilantly to his feet. One stride, and his sword was in his hand. He tossed Isabella's chemise to her, and stood gazing right and left. "That was Luis," he said between gritted teeth. "He must have shadowed me from the cabin--"**

**"--so neither of us felt him coming," Isabella finished. The chemise lay crumpled across her lap. "Well, I am very sorry I spoke of him so . . . Duncan, you look delicious up there, wearing only your sword. My knight on a white charger. But really, I'm not in peril."**

**MacLeod lowered his sword. Slowly, he began to grin. "Cover yourself, woman, or you may be endangered yet. I ought to go talk--"**

**But Isabella was tilting her pretty face up to his; she shrugged elaborately and brushed the wayward chemise off her thigh. "If you leave me now," she promised, "I will never, ever forgive you. Come down here, Duncan." And she kissed the air at him.**

**MacLeod hesitated. "I think . . ." he began.**

**"Don't think," said Isabella.**

**#**

**Luis ran.**

**He was mortified, as only a teenager can be. He blushed with every fiber of his being. He was hot and bothered, not to mentioned embarrassed beyond words. And he wished it was the day before yesterday, or last week or last month--any time in the past, when his future had been . . . estupendo. Magnifico. Fantastico. Maravilloso.**

**His future--ha! He was dead now. A monster, like the mantequero--the undead creature which wandered through waste places, searching for human beings to devour. An unnatural thing, whose life was prolonged by unnatural means.**

**He might as well be dead, if he could not be a matador.**

**When at last he slowed down to catch his breath, his head was swimming and his heart thudded unpleasantly. Luis clutched the blanket still draped over his shoulders, and realized he had came almost all the way to Sobaquillo. There was the wide shallow glimmering course of the Guadalquivir, lapping round the village which nestled beneath sheltering mountains; those mountains were old and timeworn and red, and olives had been planted on them, all the way to their peaks. Every single olive tree had its little terrace and retaining wall, without which it could not survive. Luis found himself on the dusty highway which led to the town. His rope-soled sandals slapped the road. He heard the familiar comforting sounds of home: cats yowling in the alleys, and roosters in their wooden cages on the house-roofs, crowing and challenging each other.**

**He could go fetch his matador's sword.**

**That would show MacLeod. Luis folded his blanket into a cloak, and pretended to be a great swashbuckler. A hero. A real Don Juan, with no man his equal; he would undertake anything, if it involved gold or valor. Luis began to hum a tune full of bravado. And with a "Viva yo!" and an "Ole!" or two, he skirted the good quarter of Sobaquillo. Soon he was walking down one of the long narrow avenues of the old barrio, the poor part of town. Here he had been found, an orphan boy at the church door. Here he had run away from the priest at the orphanage--oh! a thousand times--until they washed their hands of him, said he was fit only to eat the mad bull. Well, they were all wrong. All wrong.**

**His steps slowed; he was thinking of Isabella. Presently he stopped and wiped angrily at his eyes. She meant nothing to him. He muttered and kicked a loose cobble. He cared nothing for women--they were not worth a man's time. One day to make love to them, another to enjoy them, another to get rid of them, two to replace them, and an hour---one little hour--to forget one of them! And that was the measure of Dona Isabella.**

**Now he was in the oldest quarter of Sobaquillo. Rows of tall houses stretched before him, every house like every other. These were big brick houses, lacking the street-level windows with fancy iron grills which all fashionable homes now boasted. All over the town, novias and novios were holding conversation through such window-grills, stealing a few more sweet words before the clock struck midnight and they must part. This innocent custom, as old as Spain itself, made the night seem dedicated to young love. Girls with no suitors pined away in their bedchambers, lit candles to St Joseph and swore that if he did not send them some boy--any boy!--soon!--they would fling his medal into the river. Boys out wooing climbed into the balconies of prospective novias, stealing sprigs from their potted plants to wear as a token of love.**

**But here in the old barrio, where there were no windows, the streets were decorated by the reclining figures of novios-- cloaked and hatted novios, stretched out full-length before various front doors. They were lying in the street, talking to their novias through the cat-flaps in the doors . . . and novias on the other side of the doors were reclining on their front-hall carpets, peering lovingly out at their novios.**

**If anyone saw Luis, they would think he was just somebody's novio walking home. He sauntered boldly down the middle of the street. As he went, he entertained an idle fantasy. Years would pass, he would become rich and famous--and here he was, returning to the slums of his miserable childhood. No one would know him then. But Dona Isabella would look at him with eyes sparkling with surprise, she would cry, "Luis! Santa Maria, how you have changed!" MacLeod would be there, sneering as he tried to bar Isabella's way; she would fly to Luis' side-- "Luis! I love only you!" --then when MacLeod drew his sword, Luis would show him who was the master now--**

**Here was his own corner, here the tenement he had called home. Luis halted in the street and looked up at the brick face of this building, and then he shrugged and circled round to the vacant lot at the side, where everyone's garbage was dumped. Just as he had thought, his meager belongings had been thrown out with the trash. He toed through the little heap that had been all his worldly possessions. Ah! His sword.**

**He kissed its rusty blade, devotedly. Then he stowed it away in his makeshift cloak, and turned to leave.**

**Two boys his age were just passing at the corner. They saw him, turned their heads and stared, sleepy but curious. Suddenly alarmed, Luis started in the other direction. But he could not help glancing back over his shoulder as he did. The other boys gaped. One ventured to say, "Isn't that . . . ?"**

**"It can't be," said the second boy, his voice reedy. Luis recognized him; he had been a friend.**

**"It is," said the first. "Luis? Luis? Luis--"**

**Luis began to run.**

**They trotted after him. A third boy, ahead on the street, looked up when he heard running feet. "Stop him! Look, it's Luis!" yelled Luis' friends, and the third boy's jaw dropped. Then he stepped into Luis' way.**

**Luis dropped his head and rammed right into him. For a moment, they staggered together. Luis got free first. One of the other boys was already grabbing at him. He dodged, swerved, threw his blanket into the faces of his assailants. He ran headlong down the street.**

**Around a corner. Another corner, down a long hill with sailing steps. Sobaquillo, pitch-black, slept around him. Novios scrambled up from the pavement in alarm, yelping when Luis trod on them. Some called on the Virgin, some joined the chase, and some just stood and scratched their heads. Up a hill, through the town square where--years ago, it seemed--the amateur bullfight had been held. Now Luis was running through the best quarter of the town. He thought he had left most of the pursuit behind him; then he thought not, for he heard them shouting; then he could have sworn that he heard running horses too. For one moment the irony of it struck him: one more turn, and he would be on the street where Dona Isabella had her house. He dashed around the turn. He flew down the street. He ran smack into a portly figure lurking beneath Isabella's balcony.**

**This unfortunate person wheezed indignantly. "The manners of young men today--" His hat had fallen off, and he panted uncomfortably, bent over with his hands on his knees. As for Luis, he had landed on his rump in the street. He scrambled up, and the man he had cannoned into promptly grabbed hold of him.**

**"Aha, caught you! I suppose you're someone's novio, eh? Eh? Well, you should learn some manners, my fine-feathered friend. You've made me drop the sprig of sweet basil I plan to wear for my sweetheart tomorrow, I've half a mind to march you to the guardia here and now--"**

**He looked into Luis' face--and squealed like a stuck pig.**

**"Luis the Orphan!"**

**"El Manso!"**

**Even in the darkness, Horrila's face was seen to become stark white--as if he had seen a ghost. A moo of terror burst from his lips; his hat tumbled off and his hair stood bristling on end, and then his face darkened alarmingly and he pressed his free hand to his heart. He panted, he gulped, he gasped and gaped. All his joints cracked at once, like rifles going off. Still, he never lost his death-grip on Luis' shoulder.**

**"It's a visitation from the devil!" he cried, uttering many a heartfelt oath and crossing himself with fervor.**

**Luis felt faint. His legs seemed to be wobbling beneath him. He tried frantically to think of an explanation, but before he could say a word, the sound of drumming hoofbeats silenced him.**

**Two horses were galloping full-tilt up the street. A man bestrode one, a woman the other. They charged straight at Horrila and his captive, and as Horrila stumbled backward in blind terror, the woman on her Barb mare rode right between him and Luis. Horrila's grip was broken. The man on the white horse reached down, picked up Luis by the scruff of the neck like a kitten, and hauled him floundering across the horse's shoulders. Away they rode like a whirlwind, and MacLeod clouted Luis across the ear, saying: "It's a good thing for you that we came!"**

**And from behind them came Horrila's despairing wail:**

**"Dona Isabella!!?"**  


**Part Four**  


**_. . . it is falsehood that gluts us._ **

**Seneca**  
  
  


**"We have to leave Spain."**

**"We do _not._ Don't be such a pessimist. What if Senor Horrila recognized Luis, what if he did see my face? No matter, the whole thing will blow over and be dismissed as no better than the dream of a fool."**

**"It will not. Isabella, it's you who are living in a dream." MacLeod turned around, catching hold of Isabella's sleeve with gentle yet commanding fingers; he drew her toward him, took her chin and tilted her pretty face up. "We leave tomorrow," he told her. "You and I and the boy."**

**Luis sat on a footstool in the middle of the cabin floor. His shoulders were hunched, his head drawn down; his elbows were on his knees and his hands gripped handfuls of his own hair. From time to time he ruffled his hair, making it stand on end in wild spikes, and then he would cover first his ears and next his eyes. Then he would chew on the heel of his hand, without knowing what he did--wishing he could hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.**

**Meanwhile, MacLeod and Isabella quarreled over his head.**

**"--I say, no matter what he says, people will take it for a jilted lover's ravings. I've already told half the town of his ridiculous marriage proposal. Let him call in the priest to exorcize me, I'll swear on a hundred rosaries I was at home in bed--"**

**"And when they question your maid, Isabella? We haven't exactly been discreet, you know."**

**"We? We?! I, you mean? Oh, Duncan--you made me wild with love for you, and now you reprove me?"**

**"I didna mean that!"**

**MacLeod released her, flung himself away with a despairing flap of both arms. He stalked to the cabin window, stood glowering at the view. Then he took hold of the wooden shutters and slammed them shut, so violently that the walls shook. For two hours now, he had been reasoning with Isabella--trying to get her to come away to England, or the New World, or darkest Africa if she wanted. Anywhere but Sobaquillo.**

**"I'm not thinking just of myself," he said grimly.**

**"I," said Isabella, addressing the air, "have decided: today and tomorrow I shall avoid this annoying man Horrila. Let him stew in his own juices--it will serve to confuse him. Then when I allow him to see me, I know ways to so befuddle him that he does not remember his own name, let alone young Luis'. Then we will wait, and the whole scandal will blow over. That is what we will do."**

**"And when they look for Luis' grave?" MacLeod demanded.**

**Isabella sniffed. Her back to MacLeod, she crossed her arms and her foot tapped angrily on the floor; she reached into the pocket of her riding habit, pulled out an apple and bit into it with a crisp snap of teeth. While, all this time, her eyes were incandescent with fury. Luis looked silently up at her, and remembered the duende . . . the magic spirit of Andalusian myth, that dwelt in men's houses, raising havoc where it would. Breaking the crockery, turning milk sour, or casting good luck on the entire household--the duende could do anything! And it was the duende, the spirit of Spain, that inspired great art in Spain's wildest children. When a flamenco dancer stopped the hearts of all who saw her, when an artist painted his masterpiece, when a duelist fought as if possessed--when a matador gave his greatest performance--then, people said that they were blessed with duende.**

**When Dona Isabella crunched up the apple, licking the juices with her pointed tongue and biting with her bright white teeth, she looked Luis in the eye, and Luis watched her from beneath his eyelashes and thought: here is the very soul of duende.**

**"I will not leave my home," she said, addressing the apple. Even as she chewed it up, she kissed it lingeringly. MacLeod shot her an angry look, and turned away, his face dark. "I have worked long and hard for all I have--I won't abandon it now! And if you loved me," she added, sotto voce, "you'd do something."**

**Juice ran over her chin and she swiped it off with a fingertip. She looked thoughtfully at Luis. She licked the dripping apple; he gulped. She opened her eyes wide in pleasure; he swayed where he sat at her feet. She slid her wet finger over her lower lip, and sucked it right into her mouth. And the boy trembled as if he was about to faint.**

**Isabella smiled, and ate her apple down to the last bite of its core.**

**"A man who really loved me," she said, "would make things better."**

**#**

**Emilio Horrila, sadly perplexed, passed his hours such in a daze of confusion and spoke so disjointedly to everyone he met, that all his vaqueros threw up their hands in disgust. They left him alone, to get over whatever was bothering him. But he had no appetite for his food, and wine was flat on his tongue. He was wrestling with a Mystery.**

**All day long, he searched for his dear Dona Isabella (who, in his daydreams, was already as good as his bride) but Isabella was nowhere to be found.**

**At nightfall, he gave up and rode away to patrol the bull pastures.**

**It was always the last chore of his day. True, Luis the Orphan was dead and would no longer make Horrila's life miserable. With his own eyes, Horrila had seen the boy's mangled corpse: livid and grey, cold as leftover suet pudding, dead as a doornail for sure. Dead, dead, dead. Whoever the stripling Horrila had seen yesterday night, it could not possibly be Luis.**

**But there was an infinite number of other striplings out there, and every one longed to get at Dona Isabella's bulls. To sneak behind Horrila's back, to creep onto her pastures and cape her calves. To ruin her prize animals with their evil monkey tricks. Only Horrila's constant vigilance could keep the garbanzo boys at bay.**

**It was a white night--much like the night before, with the full moon making midnight into daylight. A perfect night to cape the bulls. Horrila El Manso made a circuit of his mistress' pastures, cracking his knuckles as he peered suspiciously around. He sucked his lower lip with a loud wet noise, making sleepy bulls and cows rouse on the hillsides and moo like evil spirits. These were familiar sounds, but tonight they seemed weird and ghostly. When Horrila's saddle creaked beneath his weight, he started and crossed himself. And in the hoot of an owl and the soft music of the Rio Guadalquivir, he heard the laments of the damned.**

**Curse that boy! Was he so restless in the grave, that he had to haunt Horrila day and night?**

**Then Horrila sighted his quarry.**

**A boy with a bull. The silhouette of a hilltop, upon which moved the silhouette of a bull and the silhouette of a matador. Behind them was the infinite sky, luminous with a haze of stars; the moon hung in the sky like God's own white lamp. And as since the beginning of time, the bull and the boy were dancing: one caught in the charge, horns jet-black against Eternity, and one awaiting with cape in hand.**

**Horrila's jaw dropped and his hands went slack on the reins.**

**This was no ordinary trespasser. Horrila had seen many young ruffians facing the bulls--paralyzed with fear, lucky to keep a hold on their makeshift capes. Lucky if they did not fling down the cape and flee in terror. Blessed with the Lord's grace, if they made even one worthy pass. But . . . .**

**Not this boy.**

**As the bull charged, this boy was spinning--whirling like a flamenco dancer, but in direct line with the beast's furious rush. And with his cape wrapped tightly against him, not in play at all. A lunatic act. He whirled. The deed of a suicide! He whirled. Horrila's heart thudded in his chest. Three complete circles the boy turned, until with the bull almost upon him, he dug in his heels--the madman!--and flung out his cape--and the bull thundered past, while the mad boy stood there with his hands on his hips. Laughing.**

**Horrila clutched his chest. He gurgled with relief, knowing he had seen death averted--and remembered who he was and why he was there. And so, clucking thickly to his horse, he began to move closer. The sound of the horse's hooves was muffled by the soft grass. Somehow Horrila managed to keep quiet. He was sure that he was very quiet.**

**Look at that fool on the hill! Certainly he had a death wish.**

**He was playing the bull as no sane man ever would. Horrila saw him fling his cape high in the air, cite the bull while empty-handed and then run, defenseless, with the animal thundering on his heels--boy and bull seeming to race each other to the cape, and the boy beating the bull by a nose. Then the miraculous flutter of the cape, which sent the bull on its way. While the boy flung out his arms and dropped to his knees, never looking as the bull turned and charged again. Again, at the last instant, the cape was flung miraculously out. Again, the long dark twisting shadow of the bull's body slid by. Horrila was almost up the hill now. He bent in the saddle and squinted to see: yes, there was something on the bull's shoulder.**

**A splotch like a white bird. Madre de Dios!**

**This was no ordinary bull. This was Bravissimo, the man-killer.**

**Horrila forgot about catching the fool. His skin went cold and he gasped with fear. He spurred his horse, shouting. "Eh! Eh, wait, kid!" He couched the lance which all bull-handlers carried in the pasture. He waved his hat madly, to draw the bull to him.**

**The boy turned, and he was a ghost in the night. Smiling and raising one hand.**

**Still smiling, he dropped the cape and walked away.**

**Horrila bellowed. "Run, kid!" The boy covered his eyes, peeped between them and grinned. He shook a finger reprovingly at Horrila. Then he laughed.**

**The bull took him from behind, goring him through the thigh, lifting his limp body and flinging it into the starry sky. Then like a straw figure, the boy was tossed from one horn to the other, shaken and flung up again. Horrila screamed out loud. Bravissimo let the lad drop, butting furiously at him as he lay twisted on the ground; up he went and down again, and then the bull uttered a long blood-curdling roar and trotted away into the night.**

**Horrila all but fell from his horse, scrambling to run to the fool's side. Mercifully, most of the details were obscured by darkness--but no one could survive such an attack. "See the error of your ways now," the ranch foreman muttered thickly. He reached out, and his hand came back black with blood. "Poor deluded garbanzo, you've paid the price of your crime many times over." He had to get back to his horse, for Bravissimo was still out there. But in the name of a merciful god, first he had to close those dead eyes--**

**Those dead eyes snapped open. That dead hand lashed out. The dead boy clutched Horrila with a grip of steel, and he was grinning in the moonlight. He was alive, _alive_. He was a ghost. He was Luis the Orphan.**

**Panicking, Horrila El Manso jerked backward and fell onto the grass. His eyes bulged and his mouth worked in pain and fear . . . for he could see the bull, past Luis and behind him. The bull was playing with the discarded cape, tossing it high in the air, sporting like a kitten with a ball of knitting. Ripping the cape apart, between hooves and horns. Looming over the shredded cloth, turning slowly to focus on the two human beings.**

**Pawing the ground.**

**"It's . . . it's coming!" Horrila said in a strangled shriek.**

**"Let it come," said Luis.**

**#**

**"Wake up, Luis."**

**Luis groaned and rolled over, throwing an arm up to shield his eyes. "Mm. Mghm. What?"**

**MacLeod crouched beside him, giving him time to wake. His katana was laid across his knees, gleaming with a ripple like lightning on the blue steel; his expression was very grim. It was already midafternoon and light through the cabin window glared into Luis' face. The boy sat up and knuckled his eyes.**

**"You were gone half the night, Luis, it was dawn before you got back. Where did you go? And now I see that there's blood on your shirt. Why?"**

**"Oh," said Luis blankly, and then inspiration struck; he smiled brightly, explaining, "I couldn't sleep, so I walked through the oak-wood and then practiced my sword strokes. But then I tripped and fell down, with the sword underneath me. Very clumsy, no? But see?" He pulled up his shirt, exhibiting clean whole skin. "All healed."**

**"I see," said MacLeod. "Luis, Dona Isabella's ranch foreman died last night. Did you have anything to do with it?"**

**"I? You think I did it? You think I killed him with my sword?"**

**"You tell me," MacLeod said; he knew of course that Horrila had been gored. All the circumstances were known to him, and he had already drawn his conclusions. He could afford to be patient, now. Fingers wrapped loosely around the hilt of his katana, his face inscrutably fierce, he sat back on his heels and waited for Luis to incriminate himself.**

**"I wonder if an enemy of Senor El Manso has not struck," Luis mused. "He had many, many enemies. Or maybe it was just someone who couldn't stand the noise."**

**"It was no human agent," MacLeod said. He took hold of the boy's chin, tilting his face to the light. "While you were out walking, he was patrolling the bull pastures not so very far away. For some reason he dismounted--"**

**"--and a bull gored him?" Luis crossed himself piously. "What a shame! Are we still going to Scotland, though? I think you would welcome the thought of leaving Sobaquillo, for nothing but tragedy has happened here, ever since you arrived--"**

**MacLeod said nothing.**

**"But it is poetic justice too, isn't it? An irony. I died at the horns of the bull, and Horrila El Manso dies at the horns of a bull, just two nights later." Luis tried to shift away, but failed. "Both by the same weapon. It wasn't Bravissimo again, was it?"**

**"It was."**

**"Oh," Luis said.**

**"I walked over the ground where he died, Luis." MacLeod delved in his coat pocket and drew out a few limp ribbons. "And I found these rags caught in the bushes. They come from a ripped cloth, such as young men use to play the bulls. Where is your blanket?"**

**Luis' mouth opened and closed.**

**"Well?"**

**"Someone stole it!" said Luis wildly. "Stole it and left it on the hilltop to betray me!"**

**MacLeod's eyes narrowed. "I didn't say it was a hilltop," he remarked.**

**"I . . . I . . . oh, very well," said Luis. He did not look regretful, or afraid; he only looked sulky. "I was there."**

**"Oh? You mean, you did it?"**

**"No! Well . . . um . . . but--he deserved it."**

**"Did he?"**

**"And anyway," Luis added, sticking his chin out, "everyone is better off, now that he's dead."**

**"Oh?" said MacLeod. His hand moved, and then the blade of the katana was hovering against Luis' throat. "You remember when you died, laddie? How it felt? Here you are, your sufferings just two days behind you, inflicting the like on your fellow man--even if he was your worst enemy, even if he was a bull in the ring, you would have no right to do that to him. And he was _mortal_ , Luis. Mortal. How dare you--" in a chilling whisper, "--how dare you demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life? How can you justify what you've done?"**

**"I did it for Dona Isabella!" Luis batted the sword aside, scrambled away and climbed angrily to his feet. "And it doesn't concern you, because you'll be leaving soon. But I have decided I'm going to stay here, in Spain, and become a matador. I will be very, very careful and never get wounded in the ring, but I have to be a matador, you see. Dona Isabella will help me; she promised she would."**

**"Especially now that she owes you a favor," said MacLeod in disgust. He made his katana disappear, and stood up dusting off his knees. "I see."**

**"If you stay too, of course, you could help me too. With sword lessons, and so on. But that's up to you--"**

**"The lessons are over. Goodbye, Luis."**

**"But--you're leaving _now?_ "**

**"Goodbye, Luis."**

**MacLeod buttoned his greatcoat, gathered up his bedroll and slung it across his broad shoulders. The boy stood open-mouthed in the middle of the drafty cabin, thoughts flitting visibly across his face. "Are you angry at me? I don't care if you are, but I thought--I thought you had an obligation to teach me! We're both immortals, after all. I don't understand!" And the last thing MacLeod heard was the boy's voice, repeating loudly and unhappily: "Senor? Senor? I don't understand!"**

**#**

**Dona Isabella knelt in the church at Sobaquillo, arranging a vase of lilies in front of the Virgin.**

**Their village Mary was like many other such Virgins in Andalusia: a primitive wooden statue, lovingly tended. She was very old, dating from before the Moorish conquest--when, in the year 711 AD, the Muslims invaded from Africa and all the Christian towns of southern Spain hid their Marys in terror. Some of the statues were concealed in trees, some buried and some were bricked up in caves and forgotten; there was no point to it, for the Moorish caliphs cared very little what god their subjects worshiped, being more interested in taxing Christians than converting them; still, hundreds of years later, hidden Marys were still being discovered and hailed as miracles. Such a one was the Virgin of Sobaquillo. Nuestra Senora Tiene Angel was her name, Our Lady of Grace, and she was the pride of her little town; her plain face was polished with time and kisses, and her gown stiff with precious metals and real jewels.**

**A small statue, barely four and a half feet high. Her clothing was specially sewn in three-quarters scale. The wood of her face was pure white, smooth and yet as warm as a living woman's; the curve of her mouth alone seemed almost to speak.**

**"Next Holy Week, I will give you a crown of real gold," Isabella promised the Virgin, as one woman to another. "And a pearl necklace, too. And a new dress of green silk, embroidered with crystal-and-silver stars." She imagined the moment, when the image of the Christ Child was taken in state from the church and carried away to the far side of the town, to the village square. Then the Virgin in her silk dress, bedecked with all her jewels, would be carried forth in search of Her son. Everyone in the village would join the procession, which would wind through every street in Sobaquillo before arriving in triumph at the square; there the Virgin's image would gently bump that of Christ, embracing it, and afterward there would be dancing and music all day long. Because of her many charities, Isabella would certainly be given a place of honor in the procession. And everyone would know who had given the Virgin such fine new clothes.**

**Isabella touched the hand of the Virgin, whose fingers over time had been caressed into one smooth mitten of wood. "Bless me, Mary. Make me shine in the eyes of my people, for this is the home I love." She thought of the peregrine falcons, which had nested since time immemorial in the castles of Spain. As castle after castle was abandoned, to crumble into ruins, these peregrines were left without homes; then they vanished from Spain, never to return. Who could tell where they went? But Isabella knew that she was unlike the peregrines. If someone threatened her castle, she would fight back with every weapon she had.**

**"Psst! Isabella?"**

**She looked around, and there was Luis, lurking near the pulpit and beckoning to her.**

**Isabella went pale. She grabbed hold of him.**

**"Are you crazy, coming here in broad daylight? Get back out of sight. If you're recognized, we could all be exposed!"**

**"I wore a cloak and scarf and hat. Isabella, I had to come to you." Luis hung his head. "Please, forgive me."**

**She drew him off to one side, where the chapel of St. James afforded a little privacy. Here beneath the pedestal of the saint's statue, Isabella knelt and pulled Luis down beside her. "Pretend to pray. Yes, good boy. I certainly hope no one saw you in the street." The saint loomed over them, holy Santiago: James, patron saint of the Spains, depicted as one of his own pilgrims with staff and gourd and cockleshell hat. This image, Isabella had donated to the church; in fact, much of the church's decoration had been paid for out of her purse, for she wished to be beloved in Sobaquillo. Thus the stained-glass windows, in imitation of Notre Dame in Paris; thus the fine damascened steel candlesticks; thus the plaque bearing her dead husband's name.**

**"Now," she said, touching Luis' folded hands. "Tell me everything."**

**Out came his story, full of stammers and excuses. MacLeod had blamed him somehow for crimes he had never meant to commit--he, Luis, had never been given a chance to explain--the Scotsman had made unforgivable accusations! All this, while Isabella listened, keeping her face straight. Que lastima! what an imagination the child had; he could justify everything, if you gave him enough time.**

**Then, with a jar, her attention was returned to what Luis was saying.**

**". . . a matador, just as you said. After MacLeod goes away. I thought that we could buy a house in Barcelona or Pamplona or perhaps Madrid--somewhere that my face is not known--and you can sponsor me as you promised to. With you as my patron, I could be fighting professionally within a year. We would have to pick out a new name for me to fight under, but remember, none of the other matadors are immortals. So I would have an advantage. Then, when I'm established--" Luis drew a deep breath, "--in a year or two, we--we could be married. You and I, Isabella." Boldly, he picked up her hand and kissed it. "Don't you think that would be a fine plan?"**

**"I do not," said Isabella, her mind blank with shock. She drew her hand away. "Luis! You forget the difference in age between us. I am--"**

**"We look as if we're the same age," Luis pointed out. He picked up a shining candlestick, and tilted it to show Isabella her reflection. "I bet you were my age when you first died. So it doesn't matter anymore, does it?" Again, he caught hold of her hand. "Don't say no. Because . . . without your help, I can't leave Sobaquillo. I would be discovered in an instant. And if that happens, there would be so many embarrassing questions for you to answer, wouldn't there?"**

**She knelt beside him, looking at him through her eyelashes. A long moment passed.**

**"Well, Isabella?"**

**And there was a trace of triumph already in his voice.**

**"MacLeod won't leave me, you know," she said. She watched him carefully; she saw him flinch, ever so little. She leaned a little closer, dropping her voice. "But I . . . oh, Luis, I . . . when he followed me from Toledo I never knew it would come to this. He is so possessive. Almost obsessed. Oh, he would not be dangerous to another man, you yourself will never see any sign--but he, with a woman, he--" She let a tear fall. "With a man, a perfect gentleman. But with a woman--the coward!--he turns another face."**

**She saw him waver.**

**"He's a coward, you say?" he remarked at last.**

**"Oh, Luis," said Isabella, opening her eyes wide, "you could be my savior."**

**After he was gone, Dona Isabella walked back to the front of the church. Again, she began to arrange her offering of flowers; but soon she slowed and stopped. She sat thinking, with one hand on the hem of the Virgin's skirt.**

**Such a picture they made--the living woman, and the work of art. Their two faces were curiously alike. Both seemed young, yet both were old; both were beautiful. But one was white and smooth and warm, and the other was white and smooth and cold.**

**#**

**When MacLeod arrived at the church, he felt the presence of another immortal.**

**It was hours later, at the end of a breathless hot afternoon. As MacLeod searched for Dona Isabella (first he had called at her town-house, then ridden to the bull-ranch hacienda, then back to Sobaquillo again) a line of clouds had begun to pile up against the horizon. At this signal, he had seen the farmers in the fields abandon their work and hurry to shelter. By the time he got back to Sobaquillo, these clouds covered the whole sky: tumbling purple-black clouds, shot through with light like a yellowing bruise. But there was no wind at all. Indeed, the atmosphere was so thin that it felt hard to breath. And Sobaquillo's streets were emptying--everyone was shutting themselves indoors and slamming the shutters to.**

**Disliking the look of the weather, he rode faster. In his hand was a slip of paper, which the maid at Isabella's town-house had finally been persuaded to give him. MacLeod had unfolded the paper and read, in Isabella's handwriting: _I will be waiting in the church._**

**Here was the church, its stone facade admitting directly on the cobbled street. An excellent church, on which much love and money had evidently been lavished. Even now, work was proceeding on the facade; scaffolding had been set up, and tools lay abandoned beneath it. MacLeod tied his horse to a nearby post, and walked toward the doors. A gust of wind snatched his hat off, he rescued it in the nick of time. "Isabella?" he called. He opened one door, and looked through.**

**She was there, kneeling at the feet of the Virgin. Framed by pure white candles and flowers, with colored light streaming over her black, black hair.**

**As MacLeod stepped through the door, the storm struck.**

**The door was almost torn from his grip. The air had shivered; then a tremendous blast--the north wind like a tiger from its cage!--had blown round the corner of the church and hit MacLeod a staggering blow. The world became one sustained trumpet-blare of noise. Leaves whirled out of nowhere, and a piece of scaffolding sprang free and was dashed clattering to the ground; it broke apart and poles went rolling and bouncing down the road. All over Sobaquillo, houses were shaking, walls wildly creaking, and chimneys roaring with wind. He had to fight to shut the door behind him.**

**And Isabella came running to him. Never had she been so beautiful. Her black hair streamed back in the wind through the door, and she thrust it aside with an impatient sweep of her hand. Her eyes were stars, her lips blood-red. "Bar that door, Duncan!" She had to shout to be understood. "Hear that? That's roof-tiles falling in the streets out there. No one can go out now, it's much too dangerous."**

**"What can we do?"**

**"Wait a little while. The wind will slacken when the rain starts. Duncan, Duncan--I thought you'd never come!"**

**"Isabella? Why have you been crying?"**

**"Oh that's nothing. Just a childish fear. Hold me, Duncan--we're stuck here, all alone."**

**"Isabella!" said MacLeod, scandalized. "This is a church, after all!"**

**"God loves all lovers," said Isabella. She pressed herself against him. "I am mad for you, Duncan. Kiss me."**

**He kissed her. What else could he do?**

**Then he held her away from him, looking gravely into her eyes. "Isabella. I've been searching for you all day. To tell you I'm leaving."**

**Whirls of air coursed through the church, coming right through every crack of the doors. The walls were swaying, the candles snuffing out. It was icy cold. Above, the stained-glass windows had become quite black.**

**Outside, the wind bellowed.**

**"Is it because of Luis!" she cried, clutching him with thin white fingers. "Because of that crazy boy, you'd leave me! Tell me you would stay, if not for him!"**

**"I think I would like to stay here with you for a hundred years! But yes--this place is dangerous now!" Urgently, he bent and kissed her again.**

**"For that we must blame the boy--" Between wild kisses, gasping into his ear: "What can we do about him?"**

**"Nothing, I fear--he's too young and arrogant, he won't listen to us. He's bound to expose himself, and then anything could happen." MacLeod shook his head. "Won't you come with me to Paris, Isabella?"**

**The wind had slackened. The whole world seemed to wait breathlessly for her answer. Then there was a crack of thunder--and the rain came down on the church roof like the gunfire of a battlefield.**

**"This is my home," she said.**

**"Then this is goodbye," said MacLeod. He passed a hand over his eyes, and released her. "Oh, Isabella. I wish you would come."**

**Never had leave-taking seemed so hard.**

**As he put a hand on the door-latch, he looked back. Isabella stood in the aisle, stretching out her hands in entreaty, and all around her were paintings and sculpture. The lovely Virgin gazed over her shoulder, and there off to the left were Roman soldiers kneeling in repentance before the Cross; to the right, veiled Muslims from the Maghrib advanced, bearing a holy talisman--the arm of Mohammed himself--as they came to conquer Andalusia. Likewise, the whole history of Spain marched across the walls: there were Phoenician mariners, Carthaginian warriors, Conquistadors in armor, and haughty Jesuits holding bibles to their hearts, and tucked away in one corner was a Jewish scholar with a Talmud scroll. And finally, there were the good Sobaquillano peasants of the modern day, bearing the tools of their labor: hoes and hods, shepherds' crooks and sections of vine-trellis, mule-whips and shovels.**

**"Don't leave me," she pleaded.**

**He shook his head, and opened the door.**

**The rain was like wet black velvet. He could not resist one final backwards glance. And then someone hit him on the back of the head.**

**#**

**When he woke, his hands were tied behind his back and there was a hood over his head.**

**"Lie still, Senor MacLeod." Naturally, it was Luis' voice he heard. It was Luis, apparently, who patted his head in clumsy reassurance; it was Luis who told him, "This won't hurt a bit." It was Luis who took hold of his legs, and began to drag him out of the church.**

**Off holy ground.**

**MacLeod doubled up explosively, ripping free from the boy's grip, and jack-knifed with a violence that flipped him right to his feet. He jerked at the rope round his wrists, growled a curse through the sack on his head. "Madre de Dios!" he heard.**

**He dropped to the floor, rolled himself into a ball, and voila! his bound wrists were passed beneath his body, ending up before him. As he sprang back upright. As he bent his head and pawed at the sack, fingers touching coarse rope wound in many knots. MacLeod abandoned the thought of untying the sack, swung around--listening. His katana was missing. Where was the boy now?**

**"Senor, you'll only make this more difficult--"**

**"Isabella!" shouted MacLeod. "Isabella!!"**

**"Senor, stand still!"**

**"Like hell I will," said MacLeod. He knew now where Luis was. "Let's take this out on the street."**

**He lowered his head and charged. Luis yelled as Mac cannoned into him; then both men went staggering out onto the street.**

**"You can't do this, I have your sword, and you're blind--"**

**"Hah," MacLeod said. He took hold of the sack, and yanked.**

**The cloth, already soaked, ripped right apart. Rain hit him in the eyes, streaming over his face. The wind was gusty, freezing cold; hail and sleet were falling, and water ran in sheets along the surface of the street. Wherever a cobble had jarred loose, there was a miniature eye of leaping water. If this kept up, all Sobaquillo would be flooded. But more chilling than the rain, the sight Mac saw hit him in the heart: Luis with the katana, meaning to take his head . . . and Dona Isabella framed in the church doorway, calling out in her lovely voice: "Do it, I won't interfere--!"**

**Luis charged.**

**MacLeod swung his whole body sideways. The boy went right past, uttering a cry of bewilderment as he rammed the church door. "You can't do this!" He bounced off the door, raised his sword, made another charge. "Stand still, Senor MacLeod!" MacLeod sprang back, and swung his foot around. Luis fell headlong, yelping. "What are you trying to do! You're an unarmed man!"**

**"Oh, I don't think so," Mac remarked. He flexed his fingers, which were fast becoming stiff and numb; the ropes cut off his circulation. Luis ran at him. This time, MacLeod leaped straight up, shooting out one leg; a jerk of his body put every muscle behind the kick. He landed hard, full-length on the wet street; one twist and he was back on his feet. But Luis hit the ground, screaming with pain, and stayed there.**

**Another kick, straight to the point of the boy's chin. "You're dead," MacLeod said grimly. He dropped to one knee and groped for his katana.**

**But when he got it, it slid right through his numbed fingers. Luis came back to life at the same instant, scrambling up and grabbing the blade. "Ole!" the boy crowed, dancing backwards. He whirled the katana around in huge circles, sweeping rainwater through the air. "You thought you could get me, senor, but I'm the matador here and you, you are the bull--"**

**"Bravo," said MacLeod between gritted teeth. He blinked rain out of his eyes. "You're brave, I'll give you that. But you haven't played in this ring long enough to learn the game."**

**He rose, holding one of the broken scaffolding poles.**

**"Come," he said.**

**Luis came. MacLeod sidestepped his mad rush, and sent him reeling on his way with a smack from the pole; then while the boy got turned around, he set the pole against his knee and snapped it clean in two. Like a matador with the banderillas, he waited for the charge.**

**Luis came. Rap _rap_ went the two pieces of pole. The katana flew out of the boy's hand, and the boy hit the pavement and slid belly-down across it. A wave of water sprayed knee-high as he did. The katana struck the ground and leaped up, ringing, and Mac trapped it between the two sticks and let it drop right into his hand. This time, he kept hold of it. He took two long steps, and killed Luis with a clean thrust to the heart.**

**"You're dead," he repeated.**

**He had almost got his hands free when Luis woke again. Up he came, drawing his own sword--what would it take, before he gave up? "The fiend take you." MacLeod turned, holding the katana two-handed. "Have you had enough, ye damn fool?"**

**"You're a dead man," Luis shrieked, and charged headlong at him.**

**Whack went the flat of the katana across his back; smack went Luis, face-down in the street. "Don't make me kill you, Luis."**

**"You can't hurt me! You can't hurt me! You can't--"**

**Mac did.**

**"You can't," said Luis stupidly, looking at the blade in his ribs. He slid backward, and died a third time.**

**"Oh, lad, you're dead," said MacLeod sorrowfully. Now to cut his hands free-- He did it, glanced down, and blinked. Already, Luis was staggering back onto his feet. "Jesus, you never quit, do you?"**

**"You're no different than a bull!" the boy screamed. Spittle flew from his lips. "I can kill you, I can!"**

**"You can't."**

**"I can . . . ?"**

**"No, Luis. You can't. You never will be able."**

**For a long moment the boy stood wavering, caught between the two of them: MacLeod waiting with katana en garde, and Isabella--a ghost in the church doorway, her face luminous in the rain. Then she spoke clearly: "Do it, and I will make you the greatest matador alive."**

**MacLeod drew a deep breath. Luis, perhaps dazed, faced him foresquare, about six feet off; he appeared almost frozen in place. MacLeod lifted his left hand, as a matador might his muleta at the moment of truth; imperatively, he snapped his fingers. Then he turned, standing sideways, and raising the sword in his right hand, he sighted the point of the blade toward the boy. Like a salute. "Hola, toreo," he called. "Hoy, hoy!"**

**Luis' face twisted. He screamed, "I'll never give up! Never give up!!" and charged, for the last time.**

**"Do it!" cried Isabella.**

**MacLeod did.**

**The quickening burned through him, like hot acid running in the marrow of his bones. When it was over, he found himself slumped on his knees in the street; the rain had ended, the clouds had opened, and a shaft of moonlight shone down. His katana lay forgotten in a puddle. And Isabella held him, cradling his head to her breast. "My dolorous knight," she crooned. "My hero. My man."**

**His reaction was instinctive--to jerk backward with a hiss of breath, to snatch up the sword as he got out of her reach.**

**"Duncan?"**

**"You did this," Mac said, flatly. "Set him up for me to behead. You delivered him to his death--like a bull-calf to the ring."**

**"Now, now, my love--I was just being generous. Remember, I could have had his quickening myself. You must consider him my gift to you." Incredibly, there was hauteur in the curl of her lip, in the delicate flare of her nostrils. "He was a fool, and clumsy. Now we are safe again. When you are calmer you will understand, Duncan: I did it for you and I."**

**"And when I tire you? There is no 'you and I', senora," said MacLeod very quietly. "For you there is only matadora and bull, I think." He inclined his head. "Farewell, Isabella. I pray we do not meet at the Gathering. For your weapons are not the sort that a man should fight."**

**"Duncan--you can't be serious--"**

**"I am."**

**"Duncan this isn't right--"**

**"It is."**

**"No, no, you can't betray me like this, not after what I've done for you--"**

**"Goodbye, senora."**

**" _Duncan!_ "**

**He left her there, standing in the street.**

**He hoped never to see her again.**

**But there were tears in his eyes, tears on his face, and her last words wrung him to the heart-- for she wailed after him, as Luis had wailed: "Why are you going? I don't understand! Duncan? Tell me what I did! Duncan--I will never understand!"**  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Note: in a professional Spanish corrida or bullfight, six bulls are met by three matadors; each matador kills two bulls. These bulls always die at the end of the fight. There is a time limit, warnings are given, and if the matador is unable to make the kill then another matador must come in and do it for him. Men and horses also die during fights--especially horses, who used to be killed in frightening numbers before the modern practice of armoring them in quilted cloth was instituted. Nowadays, the horses, men and bulls still die . . . but at least the horse has more chance to survive.**

**But in amateur bullfights (which used to be held in every small Spanish town) the bulls were not killed. Instead, it was the men who died. Reckless youngsters in every province lined up in droves for the privilege of caping a live bull; only through the bullring could they escape poverty. Antibiotics were nonexistent, doctors few and far between. Any serious goring was a death sentence. It's ironic in a way: the lives of aspiring matadors were thrown away like garbage at such fights, but the bulls were preserved, because they were more valuable than men.**  
  
  


  


**Originally posted elsewhere November 14th, 1999**  
  
  
  
  



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